Jamelle Bouie: The World's Most Influential Racist Is Bankrolling Republicans

Hello, welcome to the Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show. It's been a minute. TikTok sensation. Opinion columnist for a little outlet called the New York Times as well. He's the host of Takes by Jamel Bowie, and he's based in the sweater vest capital of the world, Charlottesville, Virginia. It's Jamel Bowie. What's up, man? Hey, thank you for having me back. All right, let's do it. Much to discuss. I was intrigued by your latest column in the Times discussing the manner in which the Trump administration is a cargo cult. And we get into one story in particular, but I think it'd be an interesting place to start to just kind of explain that concept and why you called it that and what we're seeing. So the classic cargo cult, right, is that in these Polynesian islands in World War II, there would be these American supply planes, dropping supplies, and the supplies would come and the people would be happy about it. And then once the war was over and the planes weren't flying anymore, the people on these islands would develop these rituals, basically trying to summon the cargo again. They had no sense of the mechanism. They knew the outcome they wanted. They didn't quite understand the mechanisms. They took to almost like a mystification of the thing they think they thought was bringing the cargo. That's, I think, a useful metaphor for thinking about the administration, which is they have an end in sight, which is this consolidated authoritarian regime. And they think they know how to get there. But often, in my view, what it seems like they're doing is they're kind of, they are trying to summon the energy of that authoritarian consolidated state without actually doing the kind of concrete and practical things you would need to do to make that durable. And what that ends up looking like are these aggressive abuses of power that in the end tend to be a wall. And so they're trying to summon the energy of that authoritarian consolidated state without actually doing the kind of concrete and practical things you would need to do to make that durable. They're so illegal. They're so out there that they provide the targets a lot of actually ability. And ridiculous. Not just illegal. They're so like comically absurd. Right. Comically ridiculous. Absurd. I mean, like going after James Comey over the seashells is like really not meaningfully different than building, you know, a landing strip for an imaginary plane. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And so I use the cargo cult metaphor to kind of capture this thing where it's not that you should not discount the goal that they have. That's very serious. And it isn't that even that you should discount what they're doing, like the actual concrete actions, but that there is a disconnect between one and the other. And that disconnect is both the place where if you are an opponent or target, there's like a lot of place for pushing back. But also that disconnect is, I think, why after almost two years of this, it's like they don't really have much to show for it other than this deeply unpopular, misadministration, which has done real damage and havoc to the American system, but has not succeeded at its, I think, its actual primary goal, which is this consolidated authoritarian state. Yeah. I like to think it's a good way to look at kind of a disconnect that I like try to explore on the show a lot, which is like the ways in which they're simultaneously like menacing and clownish, you know, and trying to figure out how to kind of balance that and how to appropriately contextualize that for people. Right. Because if you just look at the menacing part, you know, kind of. Unpending kind of a MAGA fascist authoritarian regime, you know, where Trump is going to pass down to Barron, you know, the powers and we're going to have concentration camp, right? You know what I mean? Like, if you just focus on that, like, I think you're kind of missing the story. If you just focus on the clownishness, though, and I think some of my like, you know, other anti-anti-Trumpers, we call them a lot of times, you guys are too alarmist, right? Because they're only focusing on the clownishness and you kind of have to synthesize like those two elements because both exist together and sometimes one, you know, more acutely than the other. Right, that's exactly right. I've always liked to think of it as Trump himself is this almost comical figure, but his will to power is very, very real. That's not fake. That's a real thing. And simply having an insatiable will to power can cause a lot of destruction, even if he is a comical figure in some regards. And even if in the end, he ends up, you know, falling on his face. So the cargo code concept you drilled down in particular on the case involving Ilhan Omar, the article's titled The Hunting of Ilhan Omar. We've learned she's now going to have to move out of her house. There's continued developments on it today. But why don't you just kind of frame up, you know, your argument about what you saw about the case? Sure. I mean, the relevance of the cargo code metaphor to the case is here again, you have a situation of an aggressive abuse of power. Obviously, I think people intuitively think themselves this is a lot, right, going after a sitting congressperson. But I think it's really waiting their home. Yeah, waiting their home. Investigating her over this paperwork issue from 30 years ago would have been abuse of power. But, you know, I don't know, like, sometimes people in the other party fill out paperwork wrong, right? Like to take that to be like, hey, we're gonna send agents of the state to like, into her house to start rifling through her. Yeah, you know, that obviously is just such an overstep and kind of authoritarian theater. Making her like she's John Gotti or something, right? Right. That's a lot. So I think that's people kind of grasp that intuitively. I think it's really worth drilling down on two elements of this that are just, I mean, for lack of a better word, insane. The first is, as you just mentioned, this is about paperwork from 30 years ago that her father filled out her father who passed away about a half decade ago. Like this, this actually isn't the claim here that the charge is that as a child, as a 12 year old, Ilhan Omar was somehow involved in, you know, falsifying, fudging paperwork that her father filled out and has been maintaining a fiction that she is not the age she says she is for 30 years, despite the fact that on every single legal document you can imagine, Ilhan Omar has been quite consistent about her age. The idea that this is about some good faith, you know, the paperwork's wrong is nonsense. But the other thing is that obviously that she's a target because she's a critic of the president. She's a critic of the president. She's a Somali-American critic of the president. And so on the former part, you know, Congress, members of Congress are protected by the constitution, not just under the first amendment, but by what's called the speech and debate clause of article one. And the speech and debate clause just says, listen, if you're a member of Congress, whatever you say in your capacity as a member of Congress is protected speech. And it's like, it's actually quite broad. I mean, there's basically, there's very little you can't say as a member of Congress that isn't protected speech under the speech and debate clause. The other thing is that the constitution clearly says that Congress is the judge of its own members. Obviously people are elected, but once they're there, it is either the house or the Senate that decides whether that person can stay if there's some controversy or whatnot. They are the judge of their own members. Both of these, I kind of allude to this in the piece, but both of these are part of our like larger inheritance from the English political tradition, the English civil war, the long these things are all about the King's relationship to parliament. And part of what Charles the first did was like try to arrest members of parliament to force them to submit. So this is, has a long providence in the Anglo-American political tradition and Trump by trying to arrest and naturalize and deport Omar for her views. He's basically also going after these key congressional prerogatives. I really think you should understand that. I think it's a very important point. And I understand this as an attack on Congress, as well as an attack on this particular member. And then the second thing is just the insane racism of the president, the wild racism of the president. I think we get habituated to like, you know, that's just how he is. But I think it's really worth considering Andrew Johnson, the first president to be impeached, was impeached in part because of his rhetoric in the campaign season. He was going around saying wild stuff that was inflammatory, that was extremely racist. And members of Congress were like, that is simply unbecoming of the president because of the importance of presidential rhetoric. Those words mean something. They have weight. And the president's hate speech against Somalis. Do you have a, do you have an Andrew Johnson statement off the dome? I don't have an Andrew Johnson statement off the dome. I probably should just memorize one just so I can have it. The president's hate speech actually is very consequential. Like it's genuinely unique. You can think of some very racist presidents in American history. They kept that stuff to themselves out of a recognition that it's just not something the president should say for very practical reasons. The closest comparison I could think of in terms of this happening before is the government's successful attempt to remove Emma Goldman, an anarchist activist in the early 20th century from the United States. And this sort of attempt to denaturalize political opponents, unfortunately has a history in this country. But most of us look back at that history and we say to ourselves, you know, something to be ashamed of. The administration looks back at that history and really does see it as a proof of concept for what they might try to do to their opponents. It was article 10. I tried to see if our AI betters could have figured out a direct quote for me, but it was article 10 of his impeachment. Oh, article 10. All right. Let's see, the Cleveland, Ohio harangue, the St. Louis, Missouri harangue. It was a campaign tour called the swing around the circle. And so he was like, pulling the country by train and saying wild stuff. Speaking of wild stuff. So here's our current president. morning on this front, or maybe it was last night, bleeding about Ilhan Omar. It was just revealed that Ilhan Omar's name is not Ilhan Omar, the one she used to get elected and sworn into Congress, but rather it's an entirely different name. Ilhan Nur Said Elmi. And their last name is also the exact name of her brother, the person they said she married and had children with. When asked whether or not she was married to her brother, she said, not to my knowledge, not the words. He says, please inform, this is to your point about the attack on Congress, please inform the Speaker of the House of Representatives, James Michael Johnson, that the Democrat party should concede her seat. Ilhan Nur Said Elmi, her real name, has admitted to fraud. She will not be legally allowed to be a member of this august body from this point forth. My actual first thought here is that the obsession with middle names is very reminiscent of birtherism. It's very kind of just straight from, you know, Barack Hussein Obama, just that attempt to treat the middle name as some dual Muhammad Elsa. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Some key to some secret intent that the person has. There's just many false statements in there, you know, about having children with a brother. And it's just like, this is one of these things, like, I don't like, how do you process or deal with this where you have the president, like advancing, you know, kind of wildly racist lies about a member of Congress simultaneously to having his justice department target her. Right. Aggressively. Right. Like, I mean, this is just kind of closing the circle, like together, the kind of clownishness and the menacing. Right. You know, in one case. And part of, I would say part of the larger problem is that the actor that's supposed to respond here is Congress. Right. Yeah. Congress is supposed to be the one that, you know, would be asking the attorney general in hearings to answer for this investigation of one of its members. You know, chastising the president for engaging in this kind of thing. You know, Congress has a role here, not just for lawmaking, but for political accountability. And the extent to which the Republican controlled Congress just has no interest in that whatsoever does make all this work because there's no, there's no institutional pushback. Democrats can complain, but that kind of brings it into the realm of just partisan disagreement, which you, which you really do need is another institution to say, no, you can't, you can't say that. That's wrong. I think Jamie Ben Raskin is going to, is going to solve that in a couple of months when it comes to oversight of DOJ. Okay. So I went to his true social post to, to get the text of the Ilan Omar post. And I try to check in on it, you know, before the pod as part of a obligation that I have to the listener, not, it's not a joyous one, but, but I sometimes skip a few days and I went today and it's like, it's always just like an Alice in Wonderland moment. It's going to see what's happening in our decaying president's brain. Uh, here's the most recent post as of this taping. Do you want to guess what it's about? Uh, I, I honestly, I got no idea. I can't even imagine the reflecting pool is 85% full and looking really good. It hasn't worked properly since 1922, but we'll now we have cameras set up to stop any potential vandalism, including the grassed areas, which were destroyed by chemical poisoning with a large and very inappropriate phrase. I can't even, I can't even translate what he means by that. I don't know if you can. We're destroyed by chemical poisoning with a large and very inappropriate phrase. I have no idea what that could possibly mean. Um, you have any deep thoughts on the reflecting pool obsession? I, you know, I mean, obviously this is the guy who was like obsessed with aesthetics, the reflecting pool obsession, the ballroom obsession, the golf course obsession. It feels like to me, it's a guy like making like a, like a city size mausoleum for himself. Yes. Trying to kind of like build himself into the landscape as like a permanent memorial for him after death. Napoleon, Arc de Triomphe. Yeah. Right. Right. I think, I mean, I do think his brain's totally deteriorating and this is the thing he's fixating on. It's like, he's fixating on the things he can build in DC. He's fixating on the shapeliness of John Hested's ass and, uh, not as good, which is not particularly shapely. No, if I may say so myself. Go visit the governor of Maryland if you want to see something impressive. Um, sorry, Wes. I'm sorry. I mean, he's fixated on his own decline. I mean, he's constantly talking about the mental tests they're giving him, which if his doctors are testing his cognitive ability as frequently as they appear to be, then they're just tracking. They're just tracking his decline. That's what that is. If any listeners can figure out what he means by that sentence, I'd love to know. So I'm sure we have to have a Trumpologist out there. I keep reading it, trying to figure it out. The grass areas were destroyed by chemical poisoning with a large and inappropriate phrase. It must be a word that also has like a pun of some kind, or he just mistyped, or it's a, you know, cafe situation. I don't know. Here's another recent bleat of his. I'm just going down the list. And we're kind of going down into hell here. And it is about Vivek and the Amy Acton ad. And we've been discussing this all week. You know, yesterday we just talked about how, how shamefully the vice president acted, you know, and giving affirmation to the message that Amy Acton's abusive and neglectful mother, you know, said about her, like J.D. Vance affirmatively endorses it and then says that disgusted him was that people would criticize it. Like that's, that was the vice president's phrase. Just pretty interesting since he had a mother, not quite that bad, but that he wrote about. Here's Trump getting even lower. Vivek put up a very powerful ad about a mother saying that her daughter, Amy Acton, who's running for governor of Ohio is a liar and much worse. Frankly, anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in office, let alone the office of governor. If my mother, the legendary Mary McLeod, Trump, middle name again, said anything bad about me, the fake news would play it up. The Democrats would be supportive, et cetera, et cetera. He goes on, Vivek should keep it up and let everyone listen to the mother of a defective, dishonest, incapable candidate explain how the daughter is a disaster who lies, cheats, and steals. That's the president of the United States on, on the ad of the mother who was complicit in the rape of her child, uh, running an advertisement about her. Yeah. On one hand, is it really that much of a surprise that the president would immediately apologize with someone who, as you said, was, uh, complicit in the rape of her child? I mean, this is Jeff Epstein's best friend. The thing I'm struck by, I gotta say, is I'm, I'm struck that Vance would double down. Like I wouldn't, I don't expect Vance to sort of be like, oh, Vivek should take this down. But I feel like the smart political play for him would just to be like, yeah, that was, that was, I wouldn't have done it. Right. I wouldn't have done that kind of thing. You know, we can go after the Democrats. I wouldn't have done it. For other reasons beyond that, just decision to double down and double that in a way that accentuates all the, all of Vance's negatives. The fact that he seems kind of like nasty and petulant, the fact that like, you know, back in the 24 campaign, he had to apologize for that cat lady remark. Like he, he is known for having this real nasty hostility towards women. Yeah. And here he is amplifying and defending an advertisement that is really just rooted in hostility towards a, towards a particular woman. Like, it's not like I expect better from JD Vance, right? Sure. But I, I did think he was smarter than this. Cause what's the upside here, right? Vivek's going to lose. I I'm very, I like vice signaling is the upside by signaling to the base that like, there is no, you know, bad behavior. You know, there is no bad offensive statement that you could utter that I will not come to your defense for. It was kind of like when he came to the defense of the staffer who was revealed to have the anti-Indian remarks. I forget if they're texts or social media posts and like, he could have just said nothing. He's the vice president, but he aggressively said, no, you know, we need to circle the wagons around the staffer who said absolutely disgustingly racist things about, you know, my wife's family, basically. It's like asserting to people like I'm on your team no matter what, I guess is the political strategy. I suppose that is the strategy, but it seems very short-sighted to me. Could it kind of depend? Like it hinge, like it hinges on people forgetting this and, and obviously, you know, Americans do have short memories, but advances in a competitive electoral situation, especially just against a Democrat, this stuff is going to come up again. Like this is going to be part of the, the opposition against him sort of like, Hey, this is a guy who when given the choice to disavow essentially the defense of a child rapist. No, he embraced it. It reflects the sense of which Vance is extremely confident about his political abilities. And I, I, you know, just obviously I don't like the guy that if I try to put on, you know, my John Madden hat here and like try to like analyze him, analyze this like sports, he does not have the kind of record that would allow you to be like, yeah, you are an exceptional political talent. He's a political talent of some sort. He's vice president, but the evidence that he's the kind of guy that can successfully thread this needle in such a way as to not make him seem like just a total degenerate to a lot of people. It's not fair to me. maybe he can do it maybe he can do it but he's not he doesn't have like he doesn't have his boss's charisma right trump can kind of do it because the tongue-in-cheek yeah you know kind of element of it trump to a lot of people does not seem like he's serious and that's kind of the big asset right people you can say crazy things everyone's like yeah well you know this is down trump whereas when vance says that you're like is that guy a school shooter right like is that guy nasty yeah that guy that seems uh unpleasant right yeah i mean jvl called a sociopath yesterday in the newsletter and i did this already with kinsinger and then i did it with love it on his pod but i just i can't get past it so i need to do it one more time with you to see if you have any insight for me which is like the degree to which this it is also just a full abandonment and heel turn on the hillbilly lg narrative i just can't help but psychoanalyze that it's like amy acton is the jd van der waals hero character of hillbilly elegy right and her disgusting mother is you know an embodiment of you know all of the systemic neglect and and drug abuse that jd vance was critiquing in hillbilly elegy right and now you fast forward 10 years and he's like he's on the side of the abuser he's like the tv commercial by the abuser calls it like it is he said yesterday there's a strange psychological thing about the abuser he's like the tv commercial by the abuser calls it like it is he said yesterday thing happening there i think so much of this if we're going to get into psycho psychoanalysis please in hillbilly hillbilly elegy the two kind of major characters are advances neglectful you know addict's mother and then his tough-nosed you know kind of crazy grandmother who keeps him on the solid path right i think this guy as much as he's sort of is like yeah i love my mom that i think he hates his mom i think he hates that woman okay and i think that it has metastasized into kind of like a general hatred of like women of women and especially independent women he feels like his mother abandoned the traditional role of a mother and like ruined his childhood and so he looks at women who do not take on that traditional role with a lot of hostility and a lot of anger i think part of what's happening here is actin is like a stand-in for all of the the cat women cat ladies he doesn't see actin as him as him i'm gonna i'm gonna read advance quote from a couple years ago we we are effectively running this country via the democrats via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they have made and they want to make the rest of the country miserable too i think that's how we see is amy actin yeah um but the other part of this is i think also vance is filled with self-loathing sure i think i think vance hates himself hence his i don't know so hence his constant attempts to fit some kind of role to make himself malleable and acceptable to people i think he has he compared himself to nixon recently and i think that comparison is not great i think nixon a lot of ways is like a much more interesting and you know frankly better person which is saying a lot but one thing they share is like this relentless commitment to striving like they have to strive they have to get ahead but also that striving is connected to like a bottomless like no matter how much they achieve no matter how much nixon achieved right nixon's the president of the united states in 1972 he's at the top of the world he's on the verge of winning one of the great re-election victories in american history and yet this guy still feels like no one likes him he has to he has to do these terrible things yes to get ahead he's obsessed with his critics right and the right kind of people the people whose whose affirmation he needs are the people that don't like him i think vance has the same thing and i i actually think part of his apparently hatred of acton is like he may well see himself in her and hates it right he see he sees someone from a similar kind of circumstance and he has nothing but contempt for it because he has contempt he has contempt for himself for being from the same kind of circumstances he blames himself probably in some regard for having a tough childhood again this is my psychoanalysis i needed some armchair therapy right yeah but the guy does seem like a like a tangle of pathologies indeed i want to talk about the other another big story from yesterday from a guy i don't know that jared kushner is a tangle of pathologies i think that he's pretty pretty easy to read um but there's this vanity fair story and i just want to say up front i don't you know it's a lot of anonymous sources and like it's a little bit you know there's there's obviously kushner's lawyers parts of it so you know i think that there will continue to be many more investigations into jared kushner's finances and and stories in the months and years to come but i just want to say what this report said apparently the dutch we're loving the dutch right now they got a gay you know prime minister handsome they flipped a russian hacker the hacker observed jared logging into an abu dhabi bank account that held more than 700 million in transfers with funds routed through an azerbaijani bank from saudi arabia and the uae kushner described as a signatory not the owner source said kushner appeared to transfer significant sums to various individuals including a warlord a mercenary and a one-time hitman i think the important thing about this is like not necessarily the particulars at this point but that the book frames this is like part of a broader plot between kushner mbz and uae and mbs to remake the middle east and that they did so in a lot of ways i think that that like biggest umbrella narrative is certainly true and the amazing thing i see you posted about this is like this is all stuff from eight years ago i mean who the fuck knows what they're doing now i mean if if all of this checks out right like if we can get further confirmation of this charge then certainly this is the most significant bribery scandal in american history and then you have to wonder if this is the most significant bribery scandal in american history and then you have to wonder like well how much money is getting passed around right like how much influence is being sold how much access is being sold we know that they're basically running a pay-for-play pardon scheme like even if this is totally not true like even as this reporter got fooled by a fabulist right okay well like the still again the broad contour is like we do know now that the uae has given what half a billion and the trump family you know crypto coin you know which is otherwise worthless if it wasn't for trump's um position so like we know that like this money is sloshing around from saudi and uae i mean to me this is just a this is just for a future democratic congress this needs a standing subcommittee whose entire job is to just investigate this stuff standing subcommittee give them the funding give them the personnel and just say your job is to just investigate this stuff and present findings and then you know if there's a democratic administration 29 those findings become the basis for a criminal charge there's something a little delicious about the fact that like all this money i mean you know when it all gets added up in the end it'll certainly be in the billions you know it's getting passed around coming from these kind of kind of sharia law oil you know protectorates um in the middle east to buy all this money and then you off the trump family and now as we stand here today like you can't even really safely fly into saudi arabia right you know and like there was a moment where where maybe this corrupt vision you know where like these guys were going to kind of do this like mercantilists in a different century and like maybe it like looked like it was going to work for a second like there were smart people who are like the abraham accord seemed to be working and what if they figure out how to get saudi arabia in there you know we might be through a period of rapprochement in the middle east and like instead as we sit here today like like all of that bribery and all all of that corruption has led to like kind of just an unraveling of the security state and across the region yeah i mean there are smart people who looked at what was happening in the first term and said maybe this worked out but the people involved in trying to make it happen not that smart right like like jerry christian not not that smart has a lot of money you know i don't i'm not a billionaire so kudos yeah good for you yeah but in terms of having any particular understanding of the dynamics here i'm not that smart i'd even say that for mbs right like i even say that for these guys right like they they have a lot of money um and no one can tell them no but that doesn't mean they're particularly smart mbz seems kind of at least at least somewhat like he's read books um but mbs is a is whatever the saudi version of a frat brat was right right i mean he's like he's like saudi kushner right like that's that's i think that's why they maybe get along so saudi down junior i don't know so that all of this would unravel because of both none of these people really understanding the histories or dynamics at work and because the current administration you know takes this incredibly reckless step of starting this war without any any any end game in mind with any way of actually resolving it um and then just plunging the middle east into renewed chaos you know to some extent this is all like predictable like this is this is what you would get with a bunch of idiots at the helm i don't know how else you can put it and unfortunately i mean the unfortunate thing is that these choices once made cannot be taken back. I mean, what's frustrating about Iran, say, to Trump is that I think in his life, you can always just take it back, right? You can always kind of revert to the status quo ante. And here is a thing that's been done for, no, you can't go back, right? Choices have been made. This is the way things are. And there's no way for you really to save face here. You kind of have to write out the decisions you've made. And no one involved here is capable of doing that. No one involved here is capable of either taking an L or learning from an L. And so here we are. We're back to Nixon. You know, these are just not very bright guys and things got out of hand. And to your point about not learning, there's another story I just wanted to flag that's like relevant to all of this about how they see the next two years, you know, particularly with regards to foreign affairs. There's a story out of the Washington Sun yesterday that says that the State Department is violating a law about neutrality with regards to career civil servants. And they're going to be asking foreign service officers up for promotion who they voted for the last three elections. Top officials in the State Department said that only candidates who voted for Trump would be eligible for mid to upper tier foreign service roles. They told candidates that their campaign donation history would be examined and any donations to the Democrats would be disqualified. So Donald Trump, people around him, they don't really have any loyalty to the United States or to its constitution, right? They have a loyalty to Donald Trump and his in the interests of the president, but no particular loyalty to like the actual national interests of the United States. And so, yeah, it makes total sense that they'd be like, yeah, the litmus test for our foreign service officers is whether or not you voted for the president, which is insane, right? And by the way, Donald Trump donated to them. Democrats, so Jericho, sure. It's like, this is just insane. And it's also, this is Marco, by the way. This is Marco, the supposedly institutional one. Well, he's, you know. Did he vote for Donald Trump in 2016? I'm not sure about that. He'll never, he'll take it to his grave, but can we be certain that he voted for Trump in 2016? I mean, I just don't know what else there is to say about this like gang of jackals who are like willfully dismantling the United States. I mean, I just don't know what else there is to say about everything that makes the United States a functional country on the domestic and international stage. And they're doing it for, for what? I mean, like, what's the purpose of this? Like, what's the aim of this? Just to have a bunch of politically loyal people? Like, okay, what does that get you? If anything, it probably gets you the bottom of the barrel given who they want these people to be loyal to. That's a good question to explore there because in some cases, I think that, okay, you know, we talk about this a fair amount. Like, why keep cash in Hegseth and fire some of these other people? And the concerning, nefarious reason for that is that you're keeping your options open for shenanigans and in the end of 2028, staying in power, manipulating the election, whatever, and you want dumb loyalists in there. Like, that's the most important thing, even if they're screwing up other stuff. Does it really matter, though? Like, if the person, you know, who is, you know, whatever, the head of the Turkey office, you know, at the State Department is a loyalist? I don't know, some other country, Belgium? I don't know the answer to that. And to me, that is maybe more about just kind of like bitterness and resentfulness and like we want to punish the deep state people that came for us and, you know, whatever, teach a lesson to these, whatever, like Beltway libs. I mean, it goes back, I think, to what I said earlier about trying to make the built landscape of Washington, D.C. just a grand monument. To Trump, arguably, he's trying to do the same to the federal bureaucracy itself. Like, the actual practical things that need to be done are less important than him knowing that everyone there views him as like a god, views him as the center of the universe. And so he'll purge, he'll purge people who have no particular problem working for him, right? Julia Curley, I interviewed her about, you know, she was a president or vice president, Pence's briefer and, you know, purged her because she was transgender. It was totally willing to, one wanted to serve the country. Purge them just because he can and because the most important thing to him is that people have given some explicit and affirmative statement of their loyalty to him specifically. I've said this before, my like relative election worries for 2026, eh, modest, like not nothing, but like, I'm not like panicked about it or anything. My election worries about 28, much greater, right? We have no evidence that Trump will lead willingly. We have none. It's not happened. Yeah, that's like, loyalists make sense for that. But I think beyond that practical reason for him, it is like the only thing this guy cares about is feeding his immense and insatiable ego. That's like, that's really it. Nothing else matters to him. You also have a recent comment about somebody else that was tearing apart the federal government for a spell. Only five months, four months? I just went and re-looked at it. It felt like Elon was in there for so long. You know, every day felt like a century with him in there, but he did leave in May. You write this, Elon has spent more than a half billion dollars to 24 and 26 to elect Republicans, yet hardly anyone in the media seems interested in asking Republicans to comment on his views and preoccupations. He traffics in Lurit, eliminates the president, the nation has fantasies aimed at immigrants and racial minorities. You know, and that's on top of the actual damage that he did to government workers, USAID, to the poorest people in the world, etc. It is pretty, like, it's pretty noteworthy, you know? It's weird. Unquestionably, Elon Musk is directly responsible for the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of children. That's a fact. And you would think that if you are Ken Paxton and you are, your campaign's basically being funded by Elon's money. Or any Senate candidate. Ashley Hinson. Do you think Ashley Hinson has been asked about Elon Musk one time in the Iowa Senate race? Probably not. I would assume not. Hey, Hinson, your campaign's being backstopped by Elon Musk. Do you have any thoughts about the fact that he thinks immigrants should be rounded up and murdered? Like, it seems like you should ask these people this. It's genuinely strange to me that it's like the political press treats, Elon, as if he is just like some eccentric inventor and not someone who for four months was effectively running the federal government. Yeah, there's this interview from earlier this week. It's pretty, it was pretty stomach-turning for me. Did you, have you watched Walter Isaacson's interview with Elon Musk? Oh, no, I heard about it. Yeah, I just want to read you just one little bit of it. Isaacson's asking him about, like, the interview is essentially about his businesses. So, like, he starts this question in the premise about, like, was that Elon Musk? Was that time in the government a distraction from, you know, the work that you could have been doing with XAI and the, you know, space and all that? And Musk, you know, talks, says, acknowledges yes, but then he goes on to say, it was kind of cool because I'm just there in the Oval Office while all these big momentous decisions are being made and having some impact on what's being done. Isaacson replies, so you seem to get a bit intoxicated by it. Musk replies, I think that's true. I got carried away, basically. It's like, he said it. He's like, I did it. I'm in there in the Oval Office. I'm the richest man in the world. I'm in the Oval Office and I'm making decisions that led to, you know, as you mentioned, like the deaths of the most vulnerable children in the world, but also, you know, like the weakening of, you know, America's, you know, civil service, people getting fired. Right. Tens of thousands of American livelihoods irrevocably changed. And who knows, funding for research. Like, he impacted things. Across so many different parts of the government in such a short period. And he was like, I did it. I was there in the Oval Office. And people, like, kind of don't ask politicians who he supports to have to carry any of that baggage. Or, I mean, or maybe they don't see this baggage. They don't have to, you know, carry that with them in the same way that, like, Democrats have to answer for Hassan or whatever. Right. I mean, that's the thing. Like, it'd be one thing if no one got, asked about their associations. It's like, okay, well, that's just consistent. But I remember watching Democrat after Democrat being asked about Hassan Piker. And it's like, I don't know. At a certain point, he's a streamer. I mean, Abdul campaigned with him. So I understand Abdul getting asked about him sometimes. But, like, every interview Abdul did, it was like, that was like the main line of questioning for him was, like, random things Hassan said. And, like, meanwhile, Hassan didn't donate to all these other people. Like, John Ossoff. John Ossoff gets asked about him. And, like, meanwhile, Elon Musk is literally funding the Republican Senate campaigns. But I think last update, he has spent $440 million. He's the largest single donor in American political history. And it's crickets about. And, I mean, right now, he's actively harming Ukraine. Like you're saying, like, you could ask about the USAID stuff or the dismantling of the government. You could ask about all of his racist tweets. racist tweeting like even it's not as if he had only had power in the past like he currently has enough power that he's like throttling ukraine's access to internet and causing deaths of ukrainian kids he's interfering with actual american foreign policy unilaterally and yeah i just repeat myself it just it seems like republicans should be asked about this not even from like a partisan i want them to squirm i mean literally this seems important you're taking this guy's money what do you think about this i don't know i don't get it i don't get it john thune the majority leader can go days if not weeks without hearing musk's name from a journalist i think that was generous i want somebody to go find the last time that john thune was asked about yeah yeah yeah i think i was being a little generous there but no i mean generally generally speaking i i actually cannot think of a single republican candidate for office who has been asked about musk by anyone in political media anyone who would be in a place to do it yeah i mean i did i think this week i did see there were some about the ukraine thing in particular but like you know to the broader point and you wrote this before that i don't even cover this because it's like like what's the value and like doing a hey elon musk did another white genocide tweet today um but you just want to talk about just for a second about like the scale of the kind of material he's trafficking in online yeah i mean i wrote about this over the summer when that movie citizen vigilante came out and he was like furiously tweeting about it this is a charles bronson movie except somehow like both worse as a film and also way more uh fascist and racist and i'm a i'm a death wish defender like i like that movie i've seen all those movies i think they have a certain charm to them and like imagine that kind of you know racist authoritarian vigilante thriller except somehow even more base and depraved and that's citizen vigilante and so elon was posting a lot about it and it was lots of stuff like yeah like in the movie he kills a that's what you got to do you got to kill the invaders and then in the movie the character army or hammers character is like killing white germans who he views as responsible it's like yeah and elon's like yeah you got to kill the traitors before the invaders and he's like kind of repeating that all the time um and then just generally speaking he's always tweeting things about how you know the great threat to the west is the decline of the white birth rate you know the great you know he's boosting far-right parties that are explicitly you know uh pushing things like a re-migration and he himself calls for re-migration which is just like a a term for ethnic cleansing removing non-whites forcibly removing non-whites from the society like this is what he is obsessed with um it's not hard to just scroll through his feed in the same way that you scroll through trump's feed and you found all kinds of nonsense you scroll through elon's feed and you you very quickly get the picture of a guy who is not just prejudiced but like is an ideological white supremacist and i think that's significant right like especially given that he's the biggest donor to the republican party and was shadow president for a little bit and it's interfering in our foreign affairs and to go back to usaid took steps that are in line with the ideology right like yeah the kind of guy who's obsessed with white birth rates and obsessed with the idea that white people will be swamped globally then using his authority over the federal government to destroy a program that keeps the white people out of the world and then he's obsessed with the idea that white people will be swamped globally then using his authority over the federal government to destroy a program that keeps uh that sustains hundreds of thousands of non-white black and and brown children uh in africa and other parts of the world uh resulting in their deaths like that's all very consistent um and so i think i think it's like significant just for symbolic reasons like it's it's symbolically important that the world's richest man and the top republican donor and this former shadow president is also you know a david duke level virulent white supremacist but also that's this is how practical consequence is for people's lives and that's also why it's important and for whatever reason and um you know i'm sure isaacson did not ask about this at all like the the image that still exists of elon musk is of elon musk circa 2008 like he's like tony stark right but the actual elon musk is maybe one of the most important and powerful far-right political organizers and donors in the world i mean in a half century yeah in the last i mean certainly in the 21st century it's hard to think of anyone who's comparable in terms of his global reach his global his power his authority and his wealth and he's doing all the stuff bannon was doing that people were talking about you know kind of uniting all these far-right uh parties in various countries and he's just doing it you know with money and tweets instead of like bannon was like moving into a castle in italy and having conferences or whatever but right but like it's the same so musk is encouraging pogroms in the uk against immigrants and it's like i don't know i i feel like if you take his money in american politics you should have the answer for that i concur one thing i noticed when reviewing your material on this front we were just discussing asana a second ago is you seem to pretty assiduously avoid the nira and maddie versus meddy and dsa discourse that were happening that's happening out there on the internet it's like whether you know the dems should go full economic populist or do you do you have do you have thoughts on that is there a reason why you know you're not getting into the twitter wars on those topics the main reason i just don't think it matters i just think i just think you know a bunch of people who spend all their time posting on x arguing about whether who what people post on x is important seems sort of just like all right i i don't care um to the extent that this is like a proxy for various factional battles i think factional battles are going to be settled on the ground in elections in how people perform and how in what particular political entrepreneurs do with the authority they've gotten um i don't think these factional battles are going to be resolved on social media websites and this is just you know speaking to my own like how i view my own role as a political commentator as a writer i just don't think i'm going to be able to do that i don't think i'm going to be able to do that i don't think it is all that useful for me to wade in to this kind of discourse what would someone actually learn like my column this week i can write about ilhan omar and i can i can tell people i can teach people about the history of denaturalization the united states about you know the important parts of the anglo-american political tradition like i can i can use that column to not just talk about a particular issue but a set of larger questions and questions about i can help people understand the world and make better political choices for themselves versus i can i don't argue with some people who who post a lot on x like i don't know it just it seems to me it seems like a waste of time um and that's that's me that's the main reason why i i don't i think that's wise is there a specific type of political entrepreneurship you're interested in you're you're eyeing i'm always to see how candidates themselves are just responding to conditions on the ground like how are they reading where are voters going where are they voters are how they're thinking about electorate and how are they trying to how are they trying to synthesize various things right that's what i that's what part of what i mean by factional battles are going to be settled on the ground so like okay should the democrats be more economically populous should they be more centrist moderate well you're seeing candidates attempt to like kind of kind of move infuse these approaches together maybe sidestep cultural questions by elevating other issues and making turning those into the relevant wedges right like responding to you know i think that the the discourse does capture real dynamics that's happening but because of the way discourse works people solidify themselves into camps and say well either you do it this way or you lose whereas in practice you look at someone like john ossoff who's running in like a purple reddish state is likely going to blow out his opponent and is doing it by recognizing first that the kind of cultural issues that voters might be wary of democrats are on are not fruitful for him so instead trying to create a new issue that does work for him and that's corruption right like raising the profile of corruption and making that the thing that you say oh if you are if you care about this then vote for me right may raising the salience of a new issue um you know james talarico kind of navigating this not through substance but by affect by being like you know i'm i'm a very religious guy this is my approach to to public life etc etc i've been kind of pastoral yeah or the bernie kratz i mean like i like the house candidates like the bob brooks and sam forstack people are like we'll do economic populist stuff but also you know kind of culturally sort of tech to the middle and whatever you know whether it be immigration or crime or something like the guns something like that you know it's much more interesting to me to just observe how candidates are responding to the conditions than to argue about like essentially a bunch of people who have never run an election arguing about how to win elections like i don't know we're gonna end with that some some wisdom especially on what we're 10 days after the election if you find yourself tweeting in that factional battle and you've never won an election and you're maybe just go knock on doors this weekend you know just go call a friend get out there in the world and try to encourage courage friends to vote i think that would be healthy and i'll say this if you are someone who's just interested in politics go knock on doors i i genuinely think that the if you are inclined to argue a lot about politics on the internet the best thing you can do is knock on doors talk to actual voters because it will disabuse you of so many things you think you know about about the public producer katie had our answer she figured out we couldn't about what the phrase was that he was talking about trump said that uh the grassed areas were destroyed by chemical poisoning with a large and very inappropriate phrase it was eight six four seven remember somebody put eight six four seven into the grass okay and now we fixed that we fixed that because i mean that's what he was elected to do so that's what he was elected to do you know to crack down on people's free speech rights of saying numbers in an order that he doesn't like because he thinks it's mean to him um all right that's jimelle bowie man i appreciate um you always and i hope we can do it again in the new year all right yeah thank you so much for having me all right everybody else we'll be back on monday with another edition of the show see you all then peace the bulwark daily is brought to you thanks for the work of lead producer katie cooper associate producer ansley skipper and with video editing by dante de chico and audio engineering and editing by jason brown