Jonathan V. Last
Appearances
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Well, let's talk about them serially because they're both important and they're different. Patrimonialism was the standard form of government until, you know, the modern state, basically more or less until, you know, the United States and was actually very common then until the late 19th century when we professionalized the government and until Otto von Bismarck and the modern state.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And the interesting question is why did it ever go away? Why was it replaced? And the major reason for that is that running a big modern state with a modern economy and a modern military, you know, a vast, mighty war machine, this takes a lot of expertise. And it takes a whole lot of social organization. And that means it's got to be bureaucratic and rules-based.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
There is just no way that some guy... with his whims and his family and his pals and his personal loyalty can do those things effectively. And what patrimonialists do when they snip the tendons of the administrative state is and replace them with loyalties, diminish the capacity of the state to do what the state needs to do.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And it turned out that patrimonialist systems were just not able to meet the demands of modern statehood. And you see that in a place like Russia, when you look at the, to use your scientific term, shit show, when they tried to topple a weak neighbor, and what they wound up with wasn't a victory, it was a traffic jam.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
So Trump is doing the same thing here. It's basically a form of Putinism, at least, you know, Putin, pre-war Putin. And he's replacing competent people with incompetent people. And I think you've made that point very well on this show. The name Pete Hegseth springs to mind, but you know, there are... But Lutnik is a great example of this, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Yeah. And then when you do bring in people who are competent, like I think arguably Scott Besant is probably a competent person, you make them incompetent because you require them to do silly, crazy things, right? So incompetence is just baked in to this type of regime.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
There's some stuff they can do about it by cleaning up their act, but really not very much, especially if Trump continues as he began, which unlike in the first term where he kind of, you know, he subsided a bit and allowed some grownups to run the place. He doesn't seem willing to do that. So this is a major weakness.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
My view on this is that it usually doesn't take very long for the public to figure out that the state is incompetent because shit starts to happen, right? Yeah. After a while, it gets a little bit harder to blame the previous administration for it, say it's Joe Biden's fault, or to fire someone and replace them with someone else and say, now we've fixed it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And we're already seeing ample evidence of this. We're seeing the AP had a story yesterday about the administration members are already at each other's throats, and they can't decide what Elon Musk is doing and who's in charge. And of course, you've got agencies...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Where you've had the experts fired and then rehired and you've lost massive amounts of state capacity and you're about to lose a bunch more in the State Department and on and on and on, right? But my view of this is it is mostly self-explanatory to the public because this stuff's just going to happen.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Yeah, you don't have a choice. They've got, of course, the executive branch. And for at least two years, they've got Congress. So they're going to be incompetent. We don't have to do anything to make that happen. You know, if you could save them, you'd have a moral dilemma, but you can't. Yeah. So get out the popcorn. You know, we should all feel terrible about it, of course.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
No, no. You know, I'm in the same boat a lot of people are. I'm astonished, bewildered, disoriented, dismayed, distressed, distracted, sometimes depressed. You know, everything that begins with a D. In the dumps. Is what I am. We're seeing everyday things that were unimaginable in the America that I grew up in, or at least thought I grew up in. So there's that. And you know, this is on purpose.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Because what they're doing is not just a short-term decline in competence. They are demolishing state capacity every day. They are diminishing the government's ability, not just now, but potentially for years to come, to do the things that the American people have assigned it to do. So, yeah, we should feel terrible about this.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
absolutely terrible, but it won't be down to their political advantage. So Achilles heel number two, and this is the one that I really try to get people to focus on, and that's corruption. By definition, Patrimonialism is everywhere and always corrupt because it substitutes the good of the leader for the good of the public. That's the whole point, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
The government becomes the personal business of that state. So you get petty corruption. You get financial corruption. That's stuff like the famous meme coin exploit on the first term, having people put up at Trump properties. And you get all that stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
But you get the bigger form of corruption, which is political corruption, which is when you obliterate the distinction between serving the leader and serving the state, and you turn entire engines of government to the advancement of the personal interests of the guy in charge. And of course, we're seeing that in a big way.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
So corruption is not necessarily self-explanatory, but people don't like it. They do understand it. And it turns out that when you look through history and different places and times, what seems to work consistently in taking down a patrimonial regime is targeting its corruption in your messaging. So in the late 19th and early 20th century, that works for the progressives in America.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
That's how they take down the political machines. They're relentless about the corruption of Tammany Hall and the famous Thomas Nass cartoons and all of those people. This is how, in the modern world, it's how the Ukrainians take down their regime in the Orange Revolution and afterwards. Yushchenko, the guy they overthrew. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Yeah. They highlight his corruption. This is how the Polish democratic forces kicked out the Law and Justice Party. in 2023, after I think eight or nine years of installing some pretty deep patrimonialist roots, they got kicked out because the opposition nailed them on corruption. This was Navalny's strategy before he was killed. It was Navalny's strategy. That's why Putin had to kill him.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Navalny went big on Putin's corruption. So you can go on and on in this way. I think a seminal campaign And demonstration in America, in the United States, which you may remember, was Newt Gingrich's campaign against House Speaker Jim Wright. This is in the late 80s and early 90s. Your younger audience members won't remember it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Time is slipping away from me. So the Republicans are in a permanent minority in the House, and a backbencher, a kind of eccentric guy named Newt Gingrich, decides that he's going to take down the Democratic majority by taking down the Speaker of the House. And to do that, he starts launching ethics investigations against House Speaker Jim Wright, who's a Democrat from Texas.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And he begins going on a massive publicity tour, which initially is just basically him, right? He's just some guy. But the theme of the tour and of everything he says, and he talks to media everywhere he can, and he gets on the House floor, and as I said, he launches House ethics probes, is most corrupt speaker ever.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And after not getting traction, he does get traction, and Jim Wright falls, and a couple years later, the Democratic majority falls as well. The thing to notice about this campaign is is not that the corruption was all that important. There was some stuff involving, you know, people were buying Jim Wright's book in large quantities as a way to curry favor with the speaker. Crazy.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
This is a campaign of cognitive warfare to essentially create sensory overload. And a sense of futility. Demoralization is the goal because demoralization is demobilization. And then we stay home and don't resist. So that's what we're fighting.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
What a different era. Yeah. That's what they were going after. It wasn't the details that... of the actual corruption. It's the relentlessness of the messaging. It's the same thing that Trump and his forces did to Hillary Clinton, right? Corrupt Hillary, corrupt Hillary, corrupt Hillary. What about Hillary's emails?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Now, Hillary's emails were a procedural violation that never caused any actual leak of anything important. But with the help of the gullible New York Times and sheer repetition, sheer volume, they were able to frame Hillary Clinton as corrupt. Of course, Donald Trump was much more corrupt, but that doesn't matter.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
The point is to do this corruption campaign, you need to really focus on it as the center of your messaging. You need to organize your messaging around it. And that's something Democrats have never been able to do with Trump. He's brilliant at the daily distraction. And he does this on purpose. We know this. We've seen this and he's told us.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
that if he gets in trouble in one area, he will launch the tweet or do something outrageous in another and we'll all rush over there and look at it. Well, that needs to stop. The Democrats and the people opposed to Trump need to foreground corruption.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
It needs to be the daily story and the daily theme and everything else and lots going on, but everything can be organized under the general rubric of corruption. And that's how you get these guys.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Well, as I say, it may be a bit more complicated. There may be a couple more logical steps to go through. But I think incompetence will basically just show itself. I don't think you need to do a lot about that. On the corruption being hard, You know, I think back to what happened to Nixon. You know, he'd had a reputation for corruption for a while. People would call him Tricky Dick.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
But it takes time for this to sink in. But the American public did come to understand that That Nixon's corruption was political corruption, not financial corruption. It wasn't money in the bank for Nixon. What he was doing was repurposing the system, the government, for his own political gain. And Trump is doing that. He's doing it in a very big way.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
He's shaking down law firms for a slush fund that he can play around with. So, you can frame that story that way. You can, I mean, one of the interesting data points that I stumbled across is that the amount that they want to cut taxes, largely for rich people, is the amount that would be necessary to keep social security solvent indefinitely instead of going, I think the date's what, 2035 now.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
So, You know, Trump's corruption is going to take your Social Security money and put it in the pocket of his rich pals. So there are lots of these stories that you can weave. But you've got to build that larger narrative. The guy who knows how to do this, someone who's figured this out, is Senator Murphy.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Chris Murphy, who went on the floor. And, you know, he had the whole chart, and maybe it was too complicated and there are too many steps. But he just started rolling through it, corruption, corruption, corruption, example, example, example. The problem is there's only one of that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And you need a whole rotation of Democratic senators who are on and off the floor every day, corruption, corruption, corruption. And I think that breaks through after a while. And yeah, there are a lot of people who think they're all corrupt. All politicians are corrupt.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And there are people who give Trump a pass because they think he's somehow authentic and maybe less corrupt than the others, or he's already super rich. Wolf in wolf's clothing. Yeah, a wolf in wolf's clothing. Exactly. But you remember here, the goal of this campaign is not to win MAGA voters because that's hopeless.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
This country is basically, you know, you got 40 to 45% of the country that's just going to vote for the Democrat or for the Republican, no matter who that person is. What you're going after are those votes in the middle that you can get. And those are people who think that Trump is somehow authentic. And corruption can drive a wedge there by saying, no, this guy isn't for you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
This guy's for himself. He's turning the whole government into something for himself. And what you want to do, I mean, Sarah said this many times, but she's right. What you want to do is drive his approvals into the 30s and keep him there. And I think corruption is your best bet for doing that as an overarching message. Am I wrong?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
You know, there are ways to tell these stories like recession is because of his corrupt trade deals. You know, he's raising tariffs in order to make deals that put money in his pocket. And it's caused a recession and we're in trouble. You know, stuff like that. Recession for everybody except Jared and the Trump kids.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Well, cynicism is welcome. I understand. I come from exactly the same place. This book is an apology for the dumbest thing I ever wrote, which was in The Atlantic in 2003. I celebrated secularization and the fading of religion as a force in American life.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
I mean, congrats. Well, I also wrote in The Atlantic in 2015 that Donald Trump would never be president. Okay. So, I think my take on religion was even dumber than that, but you choose. All right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Yeah, okay. So I said, isn't it great that Americans are just losing interest in religion? And, you know, religion is the most divisive and dogmatic force out there, and we'll be like Scandinavia, and we'll be happier and more harmonious. And I was hugely wrong about that. In this century, the first 20 years of this century, we have seen...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
A wave of de-churching, secularization, unlike anything in American history. 40 million people have basically abandoned the church. Now, we're talking Christianity since this is, you know, it's obviously our predominant religion. You saw, just in a period of 14 years, you saw a 15 percentage point drop in the number of people saying they were Christian. And where did they go?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
They became so-called nuns, N-O-N-E-S, people with no religion. And far from making society less turbulent... as you know, all the indicators went south on things like, you know, loneliness, anxiety, depression, lack of social connectedness, enemy. Worse than that, we saw the rise of extreme political polarization, hyper-partisanship, which looks like a kind of substitute religion.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
People start defining themselves, you know, when they used to devote their lives to Christ, now they're devoting themselves to being the Republican who hates Democrats or the Democrat who hates Republicans. So you get kind of the infection of politics with religious zeal. And then you get the infection of Christianity with politics, especially the white evangelical church.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Well, I have... always been someone who thought it might be useful to shake things up in a rational way. And I guess we're all in that camp. I have also been someone who has always thought, I wrote a book about this actually 30 plus years ago. It was called Demosclerosis, the silent killer of American government.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Basically, this is overstating a bit, but not hugely. The white evangelical church effectively merges with the Republican Party and then effectively merges with the MAGA movement in the Republican Party.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And that means that, you know, what used to be a church that stood for Christian witness and behave in a Christlike way becomes much more like behave in a Maga-like way, which is not very Christlike. So through all of those things, Christianity loses what the founders counted it on it to be able to do.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
which is to provide this sense of social connectiveness, collective worship, a sense of where our values and meaning come from in life. You can't get that from politics. I'm not the first person to say it. You've heard it many times. But you can't get meaning in life out of politics. It's not what politics is for.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
So boiling it all down, the claim in my book is that America is becoming ungovernable in large part, significant part, because Christianity has failed. And I have to care about that, even though I'm not Christian.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
The answer is, as I understand it, yes. The higher you are on average on the socioeconomic scale, the more likely you are to be participating in organized religion. And that's not surprising because, of course, the higher you are on the socioeconomic scale, the more likely you are to be participating in everything.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
What we seem to be seeing is the breakdown of Christianity among those who you would think would need it most, which are people who are lower on the socioeconomic scale and who are facing the crises that we all know about, you know, deindustrialization and deaths of despair, and who don't seem to have the kinds of faith-based resources available. that they used to count on.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
We've seen a collapse in church going in many of those communities and, you know, churches closing at an absolutely alarming rate.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
It's about how interest groups and subsidies and regulations and programs build up over time to serve vested interests and make government profitable. calcified and maladaptive and unable to solve problems. And that's where we are. And that's created a lot of grief. The public's very unhappy about it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
I'd say that this is something I think that I misunderstood. I come from exactly where you were. I'm very secular. I was on board with the project of thinking society would be better off without superstitious nonsense. And I think one answer to that is that I was empirically wrong. And
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
The second answer that's more fundamental, which is that I have come to think that faith, and in America that means Christianity. Let's not beat around the bush. That's what we're talking about in this conversation. And it means predominantly white Protestant Christianity. That's our founding faith and still the predominant form of faith.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
That it has answers to questions that secularism can't really provide. And one of those questions is, why am I here? What's the purpose of my life on this planet? Am I more than just a random, you know, accumulation of cells that will blink in and out of existence? That's just not a satisfying way of thinking for most people. I'm okay with it. I seem to manage with it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
The problem is that if you send in, I don't know what one political scientist I know called Mussolini meets geek squad, and you just start unplugging stuff and firing people and taking over databases, what you're doing is reducing government's capacity without reducing government's commitments. Because, you know, the commitments are still there in law.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
But a lot of people need more and faith provides it. And the second question is the question of what's the basis of good and evil that's bigger than just the personal preferences, you know, the Nietzschean world that Mago lives in. or that the postmodern left lives in, that also comes from faith and in our society, Christianity.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And then finally, I would avert to the founders who told us in as many words that the constitution and the system they were giving us is not self-sustaining. that it relies on a bedrock of what they call Republican virtues. And that those have to come from civil society by which they meant, you know, family, community, schools, but they also very largely meant Christianity.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And that doesn't mean it's a Christian country. You have to be Christian to be a citizen or, you know, they deliberately kept any reference to any faith out of the founding documents, which was controversial at the time. But it does mean that they understood that if you don't have a healthy faith sector that's socializing people into these civic values and giving them some sense of purpose...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Everything else is just going to be a lot harder. And that's, I think, where we are.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Well, The sharp church, the white evangelical church, while it has been politicizing in the past, it's been more than 20 years, but it really turbocharged in the last 10 or 15 when they started going 80 plus percent for whoever the Republican candidate is, including Trump, has been shrinking rapidly. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And that's because as it substituted the figure of, you know, if they substituted partisan politics for the witness of Jesus Christ, people kind of figure out, well, I don't need to give up a Sunday morning for that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
As Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today has said, the reason, if you want to know why young people are fleeing the church, it might be because if all you offer them is a choice between secularization and paganization, they'll choose one or the other. So the point here is, yeah, there's a church of fear, but it's shrinking. It's not growing. It is proving unattractive.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
So Tim, the core of this book is not Christianity, yay, we need more of it. It's the teachings of Jesus Christ, the core doctrines of Christianity. We need more of that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
These are all things the government's supposed to do. And that Trump will be unpopular if he doesn't get done. And reducing capacity without commitments is a recipe for, boy, I'm alliterative this morning. I'm on a streak. Chaos. And that's what we got.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And that what we find again and again in America, but also throughout history, when the church gets corrupt, when it substitutes the gospel of power and life in this world from the gospel of truth and life in the next world, it gets into trouble. Because the appeal of Christianity, it's a counter-cultural religion, it's a radical religion, but it asks people to do three things.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
The first is not be afraid. The second is imitate Jesus. And the third is forgive each other. And those are three things that James Madison and the founders also needed people to do for the sake of liberalism. Don't be afraid means it's not the end of the world if you lose an election. Have some faith in the system. You'll learn something from being out of power. You'll come back stronger.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
You won't try to steal the election or lie about the election. Imitate Jesus translates into forgive. Treat every person as an end unto themselves, not a means unto an end. Every person has dignity. Treat them with dignity, especially the least of these, especially the minorities. There are some things that government should just never do to minorities and to the weak.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Like, I don't know, grab them off the street and send them to a dungeon in El Salvador for no reason. And the third, forgive each other. That means politics is not about... to use a phrase, retribution. It's not about demolishing and crushing the other side. They're still citizens. They're still your countrymen. You share the country after you win an election.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Those are the cores of Republican virtue. So my claim in this book is Christianity would be a as a religion and also could do a lot more to heal the country if it returned to its own Christian roots. A strange thing for a, you know, atheist gay Jew to tell the church. Interestingly, this is kind of resonating more with Christians than it is with secular.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Secular people are, a lot of people say what you say, which is, you know, they, they just still kind of think, wouldn't we be better off if we could be a secular country and make that work? But a lot of Christians are saying, um, Yeah, being more Christ-like is something that the church should do.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Yeah, and that I don't know the answer to. As much as I disagree with the so-called post-liberals who you alluded to earlier, these are the people like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen who think liberalism is over and we need to go back to a kind of traditionalism.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
I don't think that's right, but there's a core truth in the idea that it is really hard to be a person of faith in a modern secular society where you're dealing with cell phones and consumerism and You know, if you're conservative, you're hearing on Fox News that your kids are going to come back transgender from school and you won't even be told about it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
So all of that creates a challenging environment. And I don't know if Christians can recover the teachings of Jesus at a large enough scale to win people back. And I can't promise that moving back to Christlike witness will revive the church. I can only say that what they've been doing, basically turning the white evangelical church into a Republican Party auxiliary, has not worked. It has failed.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
It is shrinking the church, and it is tarring the church with the brush of hypocrisy. There is nothing Christlike at all about the person and movement that white evangelicals have elevated and embraced.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And I think their odds, at least, of winning back a following to Christianity and to democracy would be better if they followed the gospel of Jesus Christ instead of the gospel of, say, Donald Trump.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Well, you know, to me, this work on Christianity – so, I'm very much an outsider to Christianity. But I got to know – a whole bunch of pastors and some theologians and, you know, people that you know who are deeply Christian, the late Michael Gerson, but Pete Wehner, who you know, and of course, you know, David. I love all these folks. Yeah, David French. Yeah, I love them.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And Russell and a local pastor who's become a close friend and many, many others. And here's what you learn is that The church of fear, this sharp, politicized, partisan, divisive church that's all hunkered down and wants to bring the culture wars to the pulpit, that does not remotely speak for all Christians. There is a hunger in Christian world for those principles of Jesus.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
The people who are most unhappy with what's happened in the church are the pastors and You know, in a poll a couple years ago, 42% of them said that they had seriously considered quitting the church in the last year. And the third biggest reason they gave, after, you know, obvious stuff like, I don't know, stress and low pay, I can't remember, but number three was politics.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
They want to move back in the direction of Jesus. There seem to be some green shoots, and it's very early days, but we seem to have seen finally a bottoming out. of the fight from Christianity. It looks like Gen Z is interested in Christianity and in finding its way back to something more organized. It won't look like our parents or grandparents, you know, the cathedrals and the mega churches.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
It'll be more customized. And Russell Moore says the way this happens, Christianity has been in trouble because it got in bed with power and the state many times in the past. And it's found its way back from the bottom up. You know, it's not like the epic struggle between the MAGA church and the anti-MAGA church. It's the grassroots.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
It's the influx of younger people who are actually interested in the gospel of church plannings, new generations of pastors, the small groups, which are the core of evangelical life, you know, the Bible studies. It's you begin to create new stuff and the old stuff begins to wither and shrink as it becomes more and more self-defeating. I don't know that that will happen.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
I do think though that the message of Jesus, even to a secular Jew like me, the message of Jesus has inspired people for 2000 years and is at its strongest when it's the most counter-cultural, when it's the most in contrast with what's going on in the surrounding society. And that means right now it's at its most appealing when it's least like politics and the MAGA movement.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And so that to me at least means there's material there to work with and it's material that Christians have found their way back to in the past.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
It sounds good. And I hope we don't have to wait quite that long.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
No, Tim, I don't think you're overboard. Okay.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Way back August of 2022 for The Atlantic, I wrote an article on the six things that Trump would do if he got a second term to turn the United States into Hungary. And I'm terrible at remembering lists, so I won't remember them all. But they were things like purge the military, turn the civil service into a patronage machine, weaponize the Justice Department, use the pardon to immunize his friends.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
There was one other. And there was a sixth one. And that's openly defy court orders. And what I said in that article is we know he'll do these six things, or at least we know he'll do five because he's already either done those five or attempted to do those five.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And that when he does number six, which I also predicted that he would do, and which he did do at Mar-a-Lago, that's why he was indicted, defying a judge's order, that that's the end of liberal democracy in America as we know it. So within about a month, I think, five or six weeks,
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
he had moved right through number one through five, and he did it faster and more brazenly than I or anyone had expected. The direction did not surprise me. The speed surprised me. I did not see Elon Musk and the geek squad coming, so that surprised me. And now we are working on number six, which is defying court orders.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
He's playing games and defying lower courts while pretending not to, but I fully believe that's coming, and I fully believe still believe what I said then, which is that once he does that, I think he'll get away with it. I think his party and his base will back him in defying the courts. And I think then we're in a different country. So you tell me, am I... We might already be there.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
So this is an idea... for which I'm indebted to a couple of political scientists named Jeffrey Kopstein and Stephen Hansen, who wrote an important, very short, very readable book I recommended. It's called The Assault on the State.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And what they point out is that the best way to think about what's happening right now, not just in America, but in Russia, India, Turkey, Hungary, there's an attempt to do it in Israel by the Netanyahu government, but lots of places is the resurgence, of a very old form of government. In fact, the predominant form of government until liberal democracy came along, it's called patrimonialism.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Terrible name, but it comes from a German, the German social scientist Max Weber. So, you know how Germans are about words.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Let's not but say we did. Okay. So, patrimonialism is when the government is run as the personal property and family business of the head of state. And monarchies were typically like that. But a lot of governments work that way. And not just governments, but a lot of social organizations like the mafia works that way, right? That's the godfather. It's all a business. It's a godfather's business.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Gangs often work that way. Cults. And it's a very, very standard familiar form of social organization. What's interesting about it, what's sometimes a little bit hard to understand, is it's not like the kind of classic authoritarianism that we associate with the great authoritarians of the 20th century, the Mussolini's and Hitler's and Mao's and those people.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Because the opposite of patrimonialism is not democracy, it's bureaucracy. In other words, what you do with patrimonialism, you can have it to an extent in a democracy, but what you do is replace rules with loyalists. So you just fill the government with people who are personally loyal to the person in charge, and the government becomes about doing the bidding of the person in charge.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
But what you don't do necessarily in patrimonialism is set up the great authoritarian engines of state, the institutions and bureaucracies of oppression, which we all know if we read 1984, the Ministry of Peace and the Ministry of Love. You know, and that would be stuff like the Politburo and the secret police force and the propaganda agencies and the special military arms.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
They don't necessarily do that. They just go through the government. It's like the scientists.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Nazism was notoriously bureaucratic. You can go to the camps and look at the offices where they kept the bureaucrats, kept the meticulous records of everything they're doing. Patrimonialism is just, it's way more ad hoc. It's okay, I'm going to fire the people who are there and I'm going to replace them with personal loyalists. And you can go through the whole government, do that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
What you do is you snip the tendons of the institutional state, what they call the deep state. But that's the rule-based authorities where you do regulation by formal rulemaking. And you replace that with regulation is whatever I say it is today. That's why we have chaos in trade. The new rule under patrimonialism, the government belongs to the head of state.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
It's his personal business, and he's decided this morning that he wants to raise tariffs. Tomorrow he'll decide to lower tariffs. Nothing bureaucratic, nothing systematic, nothing institutional. So that's what they're doing. We see this around the world. It does have two fatal flaws, and that's how you get at it. You focus on those flaws.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Not sure if you remember it. Are you going to do this to me?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Well, most of your audience has. And they'll remember that a businessman who's on the level comes to The Godfather for help to get justice for his daughter. And what Marlon Brando, what Don Corleone says is, so now you come to me. You went to the police first. The state didn't help you. Now you come to me and you want my help. But you have not been my friend.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
Why didn't you come to me from the start? Because being my friend, that's what matters. And in order to get what the man needs as the scene ends, he kisses the godfather's ring. He pledges personal loyalty to the godfather. And that's a lot of what this is all about. It's enforcing personal loyalty and turning the state into the embodiment of the will of a single person.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1027: Jonathan Rauch: Focus On the Corruption
And in a, you know, in a pretty random ad hoc way. That's kind of the point, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
That's the other thing. Once they're with you, they're basically indentured servants. And so it is no surprise that the Elon Musks of the world want more of these people. They want to lower their labor costs and not have to worry about guys who are going to go and pick up and go for a better job someplace else because they're tethered there because of their visa status. And that's bad.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
And what I mean, I think Laura Loom is right, because what I want most in the world is I want Elon Musk to have to hire for SpaceX and Tesla and Twitter entirely from the audience of the Madison Square Garden MAGA event. I mean, look, there's 30,000 people there. Surely he can find some really top-notch devs and engineering talent there who are just true American patriots.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Is he saying that these mouth-breathing Cletus types are idiots?
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Is that what he's saying?
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I'm sorry. So here's the thing. This is a big country. There's 330 million people in this country. And the H-1B numbers, I think, are the order of magnitude.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Yeah. It's like low six figures, you know, or maybe not even high five figures a year. You can find them. And if you can't, do you know what businesses are supposed to do? They're supposed to pay taxes. The government can use the taxes to create a skilled labor force. Skilled labor forces don't just appear. They're not sui generis. You have to spend money on infrastructure.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
You have to spend money on education. You have to have a social support network to go into disadvantaged communities and find bright people and build pathways to have them elevated and realize their potential. But of course, these guys don't want to do any of that. They want no part of paying for the infrastructure of a government that actually runs a society and creates human capital.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
They just want the human capital so they can make money. And for them, the H-1B visa program is a way of short-circuiting all obligations to the society in which they luxuriate and operate and make so much money. And I, you know, like, fuck that. JBL sent out this rant. Pay your taxes. It was pro Karl Marx and Laura Loomer.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
This is also like the Obama critique. Remember, this is like, you know, you didn't build that, which is always right, right? I mean, you have a business selling widgets. Well, your business depends on the fact that there's a police force to enforce the rule of law and a government which isn't going to govern by fiat, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Your business depends on the entire society functioning, and that's why you pay taxes. And instead, these guys want to pay fewer taxes or no taxes at all, and they want their labor to just magically appear and even better if that magically appearing labor will be cut right and can't leave. Here's my view on this.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
So I actually think they're going to get away with it. So can I just, I want to propose something, and then you guys tell me if I'm wrong. The founder class, the Elans and Viveks and Andresens of the world, they don't want unfettered immigration. They only want immigration that helps them. They are indifferent to all other immigration, like agricultural, seasonal workers.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Who the fuck cares, right? They certainly don't want normal immigration. That's bad. They don't want people coming in for asylum. They want immigration that helps make them money. And they now have a president who seems to now want to give that to him. People forget Trump was against H-1B visas.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
He said they were bad the first time he issued an executive order in June 2020, sort of putting a halt on them. And then he came out like, you know, a week ago and said, oh, I've always thought they were great. It is unclear if he actually understood what anybody was talking about. It seems like he was talking about H2B, not H1B.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Right, because those are the ones he used. I think Elon gets what he wants. They get to have H1B. And the MAGA base, like Laura Loomer and Steve Bannon will get upset, but they aren't the base. Those are the elites. They are MAGA elites. The base are the actual voters. And I don't think the voters are going to give two shits about this because it is only like 85,000 people.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
And so long as Trump is doing something else to make them happy and to excite them, they're not going to hold a grudge over this. And so they're all going to get away with it. Sarah?
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Yeah, I totally agree with that. But I could also flip the telescope around. I mean, Trump has the power. Trump is the one who gets to person or unperson people. I think that's still true. He couldn't entirely unperson Elon, but he could unperson him. And the other thing is, at this point, he could take a lot of people out of Twitter. Twitter's already hemorrhaged users.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I think if Donald was unhappy with Musk, he could tell a lot of people, now that he's got his nose under the tent on Twitter, he could say, yeah, this platform is woke now. You gotta come over to me with truth. And if the MAGA social media actually fractured, because right now it isn't really fractured, they're all on Twitter,
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
And they're like, you know, five people on Truth Social and five people on Parler maybe or whatever. Getter. Getter, right. I think that could hurt Musk because the only thing Twitter has going for it right now is mass. And if the mass on it is significantly eaten into at a stroke, then the network effects on it completely unravel. And Musk is now running this.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
The thing that Musk cares about most in the entire world becomes like nothing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
No, we can do this. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Can I just point out how weird it is that we are in this? Will he won't he be a lame duck period? Because that is what's going on. Like people are like, yeah, he's a lame duck. He's right. Right. Isn't he? He's a lame duck, isn't he? And that is what is driving all of this stuff. And I'm so glad you said this, Eric, because you said this like a week ago and it was like a light bulb in my head.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
And the perceived like, well, wait a minute, maybe he could just keep being president introduces a level of uncertainty which unsettles all of everybody's calculations. And it is insane that we exist in a world where there is any question that about whether or not he could run for a third term. But that's the world we live in.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
And I know that George and everybody's like, oh, no, the 22nd Amendment is ironclad. No, it fucking isn't. I am sorry it isn't. The 22nd Amendment is what five Supreme Court justices say it is. Period. The end.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
And part of this is an admission that Don jr. isn't really up to it because that's the other.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Yeah, I don't do personal ones, but I have a big professional one.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I find the idea of making a specific point of introducing change in your life just because it's the New Year's to be... insipid and toxic. And that when you want to change something or do something differently, you should just do it. Doesn't matter when.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
No, because the Lenten one is penitential.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I don't understand the question. This is for the Catholic podcast. My professional was that I'm not going to chase bait. And this is, you know, I worry that Trump and MAGA are like, you know, it's like they're sitting up on the porch with a tennis ball and they throw the tennis ball because they want the dog to go chase it. And they do this all the time.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
That's what Greenland and making Canada the 51st state and the Panama Canal is. They're just trying to get people off the porch to go and run around and bark and chase because they want people to talk about that. And in print, I'm not going to do that. I hope. I'm going to try not to. I won't say that for podcasts and YouTube because I think you can't ignore these things entirely.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Like you do you do have to register that they're taking place. But for me, print is the primary product and where I spend most of my energies and try to do my deepest thinking. And so I'm not going to I'm not going to chase bait anymore. We've all talked about this before. I am skeptical about the mass deportation thing. Maybe it'll happen, but I'm not setting my hair on fire until it does.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Because it's not clear to me that this is going to be anything more than the wall, right? I mean, the wall, which we built 437 miles of or something.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I think it's primarily bait. I think it's primarily bait. And I'm not saying don't cover it. Again, I'm not saying don't cover it. My personal thing is that in the product that I work hardest on, I'm going to try not to give oxygen to that stuff, which is different than saying nobody should cover it. That's not what I'm saying. With these things, they're, you know, they can originate as bait.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
And then, you know, like throwing a pebble into a pond, there can be ripples that actually have real effects. The Panama Canal and Greenland, maybe they could have real effects. You know, Heather Cox Richardson, one of my writing crushes, talks about how she thinks the Greenland thing is actually part of an attempt to break NATO. And if true, then that would be a very big deal.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
But I want to see it. If he's serious about Greenland, then he should either go put troops in Greenland without the Danes agreeing to it or being informed about it. Don't sit there and, you know, like whisper to me about how tough you're going to be. Go ahead. Go. Greenland's right there.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Go send a frigate over there and put a battalion in with drones and all the things that you say you think we need. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. Because that's all you're doing is yapping, Mr. President. That's basically my view. But the difference is Ukraine, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
So he has reiterated that the Ukraine war will be over 20 days from now because he's going to have Ukraine all sorted out within 24 hours. That is also bait, I think. But that has serious, for real, real-world consequences, whether he does it or not. And so that, I think, is worth taking more seriously. So I guess I'm trying to make some distinctions here. You look not sold all the way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
All Trump endorsements are conditional. If it's clear that Johnson can't survive, then Trump is going to withdraw his endorsement and endorse someone else. I mean, I don't take this as settling anything. And I think it's like an attempt to try to get Johnson to do the thing he wants, which is to get rid of the debt ceiling before he takes office. And that's it. Honestly...
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Yeah. I would say part of my thing, though, is that I would like to be in the position of goading these fuckers into doing the terrible things they pretend they are going to do. Because what I don't want... And yet what I fear we're going to get is a world in which they only do the terrible things that are going to make it easier to perpetuate power.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
But all the stuff that is what their base wanted, they won't do it. And the base won't care. And the reason the base won't care is because the libs will have been triggered by the tweets or something like that. And so that's why, you know, like mass deportations. Great. Let's see them. I don't see any federal forces on the streets of North Carolina down by the Tyson's plant. Why not?
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
We should see more of that, right? Are you going to annex Greenland? Great. Let's see it. Let's see you do it. Oh, you don't have the stones to do it. Everybody said, oh, we don't want the autocracy. We just want the policies. And we won't get those policies. We'll only get the autocracy. That's one of my concerns. Sorry.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
And if they wind up being not peaceful, then we can object to them. As I guess what I'm saying. Yeah. Right. But don't, don't give them cover of like setting your hair on fire about the mass deportations before there are preemptively mad. That only serves to help preemptively mad though. Yeah, I get that. But I, I guess I'm saying we shouldn't be preemptively mad.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I'm not saying that I would take the over on three speakers in 2025, but I'd be tempted. I'll tell you this. If it was two and a hook, if it was a 2.5 speakers as the line, I would take the over, not the under. I think Sarah's call is absolutely in play.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
We should be preemptively skeptical. And if, if he goes through with it, then we can be mad.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Yeah, well, I mean, these are STEM engineer PhD types whose jobs are being taken by the H-1B visas, I assume. So these are, you know, these are real top level, you know, A++ developer types who would have a great paying job at Oracle or whatnot if it weren't for some Indian guy on an H-1B visa taking their job.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
unemployment has been 4% for four years. Oh my God.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I just want to clarify what Sarah means here. The reason we, we want to get big is, is because I think we're going to be needed as a counterweight over the next four years because a bunch of traditional media places are going to stop being counterweights. I mean, I'm worried about the Post, frankly, and I love the Post as an institution, and I'm concerned about it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I'm concerned about Time Magazine. I'm really concerned about cable news TV and network TV. I don't know if you guys saw in Semaphore, the woman who runs NBC News was like, oh, yeah, the most important story we ran was about how people in Nebraska would drive two hours round trip just to save $2 on a loaf of bread because inflation hit them so hard. I'm just like, you fucking idiot.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
And it's like us in the Atlantic, you know, and like NPR. There are very few places that are really dug into doing things the right way and not being cowed. And because of that, we need to increase our throw weight, I think. I think we need everybody's help to do that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I got to say, Tim, I was listening to you and Bill yesterday. And if a single Democrat decides to help bail out the Republicans on this, I will lose my mind.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Yeah, you know what is real? Politics. Politics is real. And, you know, to be the only party that believes in policy is like putting yourself hostage to the worst villain in the world. And this is the, you got to shoot the hostage. You know, as as Keanu Reeves learns in speed and in this case, the hostage at the debt ceiling and do not do not give a single vote to help bail Republicans.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
You've already done it once. How'd that work out for you with the the CR? Right. Did Democrats get anything for that? Did you see a big uptick in approval for congressional Democrats? I didn't. I saw an uptick in approval for Donald Trump.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Vivek wasn't... I mean, when Vivek is talking about that, the quarterback... Guy, football captain, team, the people he's criticizing their culture are MAGA culture. The science fair winners who go to college and then take professional white collar jobs, those are Democratic voters now. It is a weird thing.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Did you sit down with your children and say, boys, boys, we need to talk about H-1B visas? Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Still most of Silicon Valley. Not at the founder level anymore, maybe.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
Illegally.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
It was never on an H-1B. Elon says he was there on an H-1B. No, but Elon's lying about himself. That's the point that's important to understand here.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
JBL. The worst person in the world just made a good point.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
So look, here's the thing. She's right. She's right top to bottom on it. I think it's important to make a distinction here. And this is where we actually do have to get a little Thomas Piketty.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
I mean, I don't know. I've always said Piketty. Okay, whatever.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
There's a difference in Silicon Valley between the founder class and the worker class, right? And... You know, Elon and Vivek are founder class guys. I mean, Vivek isn't really. Vivek didn't do anything to make his money. But Elon did. He did a scam.
The Bulwark Podcast
Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: We Are Sticking With the Mission
But they rely on a worker class of just like, you know, network engineers and coders and developers. And those people are always kept in the back of the house and they're disposable. And what this is really about is the founder class wanting access to cheap labor. Right. That's all it is. So you get to pay H-1B visa type workers something like 70 cents on the dollar and they can't leave.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Look, anything is possible. I could be wrong.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
They were down 14. They only have four players. This is not a JVL is always right money back guarantee. But on the other hand, I look at this and I think these things are all hard to explain to people. I think the average person does not even understand crypto or finance or any of this stuff. And Trump has pretty successfully convinced everyone that everybody's corrupt.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And so what does it matter if he does it, too? And also, we're so polarized that any meaningful change requires super majorities. And so I just don't think you get anything meaningful done. But I could be wrong. Here's a really interesting question, though. As our tech overlords would say, Trump's coins have really disintermediated the classical lobbyist, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Because if the way this worked was in the olden times, you had Senator X, who was the head of, you know, whatever committee, right? Whatever committee you needed to get into to get them to mark up a business. On behalf of your your industry.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
So you hired his ex chief of staff because you knew his ex chief of staff could call in a favor and say, Senator, could you could you just cut that paragraph for us?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Well, I don't know how much loyalty Donald Trump has to Jason Miller. Right. I mean, does Donald Trump really think that he owes Jason Miller? I actually think the opposite. I suspect that Donald Trump chafes at the idea that Jason Miller is getting $150,000, making money off of him and his name, getting paid by those Indian guys. Why shouldn't those Indian guys pay Trump money?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And not Jason Miller.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
But I mean, I think this extends throughout the whole world. And there are going to be a couple of places where maybe if Stephen Miller decides he wants to cash in, Trump would be willing to grant a favor. But for some of these lesser hangers on.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Yeah. But for meaningful stuff, it seems to me that if you want to get something out of the Trump administration, you're going to have to pay Trump. And so what do you I think a lot of these companies are caught fighting the last war, thinking that like, oh, if we just hire some Republican lobbyists, they'll help us out.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
The answer is they ought to be pushing that money directly into Trump's pockets and they can do it now because he owns the coins. So shine. Just don't pay Jeff Miller.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
I wouldn't do that. Honestly, I would go buy Trump coin. Right. To make a big deal of it and talk about how great it is. You know, so Shine Wired is a big piece about Shine, the fast fashion company, which decided they were going to get in heavy on this.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
For people who don't know. Right. Basically. And they have gotten nothing. They've got nothing to show for all the money they've spent on Republican lobbyists.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
I have to think that might have been different. if they had pushed that money directly into Trump's pockets. Although- TikTok, look at the TikTok. Yeah, look at TikTok. Although maybe there are going to be places where Trump doesn't care. Like maybe if you're Chinese, he's going to screw you no matter what, but maybe not. Again, TikTok, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Suggest that if you're willing to make him rich, because here's the thing, Trump is going to walk away from this. Okay, I'm sorry. That's me being optimistic. If Trump were to walk away from the presidency at some point- for whatever reason that would be, he's going to do it being wealthier by tens of billions of dollars. Tens of billions of dollars.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And that is a level of wealth transfer and corruption that normally you don't see except in authoritarian regimes.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Yeah, and they like that. about him, right? I think it's more likely that he's vulnerable on like the $2 instead of $30 than he is on the, well, he just got $2 billion in World Liberty Financial coin transactions. I agree with that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
I, you know... Tim, really, you got to understand, that's all art of the deal. You think so? Of course, it sounds like he's an idiot. He wants to sound like he's an idiot because that's good negotiation. It's all unfalsifiable. Okay. All right, here's what we know. 40% of container ship capacity between Asia and the United States has been canceled.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Well, their business is going to go under anyway. We're creeping up on a 50% level of cancellations because it's accelerating. What this is going to mean is we're headed towards stagflation. I mean, that's what this is, right? So you get a scarcity in consumer goods. That will push prices higher because they are scarce. But it also means economic disruption.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
It's going to mean unemployment going up. And when unemployment goes up, you're going to have wages falling. Who's going to lose their job? Dock workers are going to go first, truckers, people in logistics, then the small business owners.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Yeah, maybe. So I want to read you a little bit from Ryan Peterson. So Ryan Peterson runs a logistic startup called Flexport. So what it is, is it's a software company that helps track customers. freight globally. And so they help people move their stuff from the factories in China all the way to the shelves in Sheboygan. And he has, for the last week, been on a media blitz.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
You should actually, he might even go on this show. He's been going on everything. He might even. Actually, he might consider this show. Right. No, no. I think he would even consider, the only thing he might not is he might be worried about being perceived as anti-Trump.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
But, I mean, he's been running around saying that Donald Trump is creating a tsunami that is going to destroy the American economy. So maybe he would be OK with it. So here's what he what he told The Wall Street Journal. If they don't change the tariffs, it's going to be an extinction level asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs kind of events. Only these aren't dinosaurs.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
These are dynamic, healthy businesses. So Flexport has visibility into about 1% of all U.S. trade. which is a tremendous number. You hear like 1%, you're like, wow. But his software touches like 1% of everything. So he really is getting a global picture of what it looks like. And here, I want to read a little thread that he did here, a couple of them that are worth.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
So the US imports $600 billion worth of goods from China every year. 95% of that at Ocean Freight. Those goods sell at retail for $2 trillion, right? Which tells you about where the value chain is, what they talk about at B-School. You know, where is the most value accruing? And the most value actually accrues to the end-stage retailer. That's why they mark up their goods typically about 3x.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
If the tariffs on China continue at this level, we will see a $2 trillion hit to economic activity in our country. The failure of tens of thousands of American businesses and the laying off of millions of employees. But that's not the worst part. That's not the worst part, right? So when the brands fail, these are American brands. Again, I'm just reading from Peterson.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
They will be purchased out of bankruptcy by their Chinese factories, who thus far have built everything except a customer-facing brand, which is where most of the value capture happens. Consumer goods companies typically mark up goods three X or more to support their fixed costs. Now the factories will get to vertically integrate and capture the one part of the chain they haven't yet dominated.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Well, no, I mean, the tariffs aren't going to last forever.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
What they're going to do is they're going to own the most valuable part of the brands, right? Right now, the Chinese own the least valuable part, which is the manufacturing, which is why the manufacturing is based over there, is because it's the cheapest, because it's the least value add, right? And we're going to hand them vertical integration, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
which once it's gone, you know, then you've got nothing. And this is, again, this is Donald Trump's, I just assume it's idiocy.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
A million percent, yeah. It's a very strong number. It's a very powerful number, a million percent tariffs.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
We've often said that if Trump were an actual Russian asset, would he be doing anything differently? I think we can say if he was a Chinese asset, would he be doing anything differently? Yeah. China is going to wind up in a much, much stronger place at the end of this than they were at the beginning. And there will be pain. They'll have a lot of pain.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
But they are actually going to get something for their pain. We're not.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Yeah, I think that's true. But again, I mean, the Chinese are able to manage and weather those sorts of things in ways that a liberal society is not, as we saw during COVID, where they basically shut the country down, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Is it sanguine? I mean, it's trending down. It keeps trending down. The bond market looks bad. The dollar is weakening. There's a lot of volatility that's kind of within a certain band. Yeah, well, that's because, I mean, so the market is really taking the temperature right now. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And so the market will, you know, like if the market says, you know, the stock market looks and says like, oh, look, these truckers have figured out how to bribe the president. I can make that trade today because today we can make money on that trade. That's really all it's about. And it trends down over time, but it's not really long term thinking.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
The bond market is the one that's looking at seeing all the risk right now. The bond market is freaking out. And the dollar is weakening. We... We got a Fed report yesterday. I think the Dallas Fed looking at anticipated orders and mergers and acquisitions. And like the whole American economy is grinding to a halt. It's because nobody can make any plans.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Yeah. So let's talk about this. This company is called Freight Technologies. It is a very small logistics company. Total market cap for this publicly traded company is about $4 million. Not billion, $4 million. So I want you to think about that. When they say they're going to spend $20 million, on the Trump meme coin. That is five times the value of their entire company.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And this is the insanity of the Trump administration. Even I hate to take it seriously because none of it deserves to being taken seriously. But the serious version of the tariffs is, well, it is important to American national security to get some certain types of manufacturing bases back in America. This is like the Gretchen Whitmer trying to steel man the thing, right? But to do that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
You need stable, consistent, predictable business environments so that people can make investments. And none of any of this has been stable or predictable. So you can't even steel man this to the degree to make it look rational on any level.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Tim, do you know who the five largest holders of American debt are?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Japan with $1.1 trillion.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
I prepared for the podcast, Timothy. Japan at $1.1 trillion. China at just under $800 billion. The United Kingdom right behind them at about $720 billion. Then Luxembourg just around $400 billion. And then Canada at about $380 billion. Mark Carney coming to the White House. So we have actively worked to piss off and go to war against four of the five biggest. Well, I guess three or more.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
I'm just saying. Not active, but we have actively gone after Canada by threatening to annex them militarily, China by starting a trade war with them, and Japan by doing all of the trade war stuff that we've done against them. If these countries begin to weaponize that debt by selling off, which would drive the prices down on T-bills, that would create enormous pressure On the American budget.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Because then we would need to sell even more debt because the debt's worth less to finance things. And if that happens, here's me catastrophizing.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Those aren't predictions. I'm just telling you what's going to happen, Tim. Donald Trump... What is his move, right? Because we understand now that he runs the economy the way he runs his businesses, basically. Yeah, declare bankruptcy. His move is declaring bankruptcy and to renegotiate his debts. Yeah. And he's already said, like, well, maybe we'd have to renegotiate our debts.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Maybe the people who are foreign holders of our debt are only entitled to 80 cents on the dollar for their treasury bills. I mean, if that happens... Anything like that, even talking about that in a serious way. I mean, Katie, bar the fucking door, because that would be the absolute end of the American financial order. And that is the stuff of like Great Depression.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Why, Tim? Because GIs over generals. It's a resource allocation thing, Tim. Okay.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Okay, so this is why they had to take out a bond to do the purchasing, right? Because they don't have the cash, because again, they're going to take a 5x position of their entire company on this. Now, how they're going to sell this bond is beyond me, because who would buy it, right? You're a bondholder, you're secured, sort of, but what are you really secured for?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
So, uh, I mean, it's pretty clear that this is a purge and here's what I want people to understand. So he, Hank says when he made this announcement said that this, this, he positioned as doge, right? Efficiency. We, we are going to be a military that relies on the grunts and more. We need more grunts and fewer generals. All these generals are chest puffed out.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Don't know what it's like to get their boots dirty. Like me, Mr. TV host, uh, And so he has a resource thing. So there are 38 four-star generals, just 38 of them. That's it. If he wants to cut 20%, that means he'll fire eight of them. Yeah. That means those resources could support maybe... 70 grunts. Oh, come on. Like at the enlisted level. That feels high even. Even that feels high, right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
But the point is like, you know, in a million man military, we have a guy who's claiming that this is about, you know, whoa, gotta mind our P's and Q's here on the budget. This is about one of two things. Either
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
He is looking for an excuse to purge DEI generals or he's looking to purge people who he believes are going to be a problem in the future because they are unreliable on the question of Donald Trump. I suspect it's the latter of those two.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
There could be some overlap in those categories, but it is utterly arbitrary. Again, the idea like we need to cut our forces of four-star generals by 20. Again, there are only 38 of them. This just means there are eight people he wants to fire.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
This is not a like, you know, well, we're going to sit you down with the bobs and have you interview for your own jobs because we really got to be efficient here. And this is a persistent feature of all authoritarian attempts throughout history. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
The guy who wants to be the maximum leader, the very first thing he has to do is make sure that the senior most levels of the military will be personally loyal to him. Right. That's what this looks like for all the world.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
You're secured by the cost of the Trump coin. And if you wanted exposure to that, you would just buy the Trump coin yourself. You wouldn't buy a bond in a company where the bond is going to be secured by the coin. But here's what's interesting. So the Trump coin itself has been on a downward spiral since day two. I don't know if people remember. I do because I made a lot of money on it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
I mean, not be damned, but because of it. Because of it. Right. And this is one of the things we see, and this is not a new observation for me, is that the most reliable and pliant people are often the most compromised. And so a guy like Ed Martin has no individual standing, right? The only thing he has to offer is total loyalty. And so people like that are useful, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Every authoritarian regime has people like this, right? And I think that RFK sees that and understands it. And it's not good. It's not good. I mean, you know, the administration is digging in on going after Harvard.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
This and a speaking slot at CPAC. Like, that's all this guy has. But guys like that, again, are useful. And guys like the Ted Cruz type are dangerous to a regime because they can't be counted on 100%. maybe 98%, maybe even 99%. But you do have to worry that they wind up like, you know, that lady lawyer at Justice Department who resigned instead of, you know, pulling the Eric Adams charges, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And they do not want people like that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
A lot of money? I mean, for me, a lot of money. I made enough money to buy one-tenth of a nice watch.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
So this I mean, I think often people like us look at this and they just think, oh, it's hypocrisy. But that's not quite it. Right. Hypocrisy is actually, in a way, good. Hypocrisy is the what's the saying? The tribute that vice pays to virtue. Right. And that's not this. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
The same people who want to see Derek Chauvin pardoned because they believe that, A, he didn't kill George Floyd and B, even if he did kill George Floyd, he didn't do anything wrong. And there are a lot of them. You should go over to the free press where Barry Weiss publishes them all the time.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And then at the same time, that's those same groups of people see Ashley Babbitt as a martyr who was killed by a terrible, bloodthirsty, bad cop, right? And you think, oh, that's hypocrisy, but it's not it, right? This is fascism. And what fascism does is it sees the use of force as properly only belonging to them.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And once they get to control government, then they want to use the government to apply force to others. But until that point, until they get the takeover, what they want to do is try to prevent the government from using force to stop them. And this is just a worldview. Like, you
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
and I don't mean like democratic liberal, I mean like big L liberal worldview, is that the government has to have in a society basically a near monopoly on the use of force. And because that power is so awesome, it must be scaffolded in by a bunch of transparent and clearly applied laws that don't change around and the rules of which are are pretty rigid, right? You have to have due process.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Uh, like two, maybe three, maybe three.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Everybody has to understand what the structure of the rule of law is. Rule of law has to apply basically the same to everybody. And the fascists just don't agree with that. That's not their worldview.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Yeah, everywhere. And this is, again, I just don't know that there's any reason to tiptoe around the F word anymore. We're not there yet, but that is the purpose and direction of all of the things. Woo!
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
One of the other things that we have been seeing, just as an indicator of what's to come, is big corporations pulling their earnings forecasts for the year. Last week, we had a couple airlines pulling theirs, a bunch of airlines now that... Not great. This is due to both immigration and the economic situation. And yesterday, Ford pulled its earnings projections.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Okay. No, I mean the no fancy steak. It's like half of a fancy steak dinner for all 12 of us. But, uh, a point is point is we've had one spike. Would you care to guess when it was?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Let me just tell people who aren't familiar with this. When publicly traded companies pull their earnings forecasts, it's not because they're not sure exactly how much money they're going to make because things are so good. It's not because they're like, boy, you know what? We might make so much money next year that we can't even begin to guess. It's the opposite.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
It's that things are in free fall. You know, we're going to get there.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Yeah. And I am, I mean, the thing I am more curious about than anything in the world is whether we get to regret from the people who did this to America. Ian, I sent you a little thing right before we got on air. I don't know if you want to talk about it or not.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
We're going to keep it. We're going to save it for dessert.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Bad. So in the writer's room at wrestling, so if you're in the WWE writer's room and you are mapping out storylines, the question that is always asked, the fundamental question is, who does this put over? Putting over in wrestling parlance is helping make them more popular with the crowd. And so whether it is like, and then Bruiser Brody hits another guy, hits George the Animal Steel with a chair.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Well, the question is, well, why does he hit him with a chair? Who does that put over? And that is always the question. If you run the Twitter feed at the DNC, before you hit send on every one of your tweets, you should be asking yourself, who does this put over? Because a tweet like that is absolutely useless.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Because what happened was a bunch of people went out to purchase this coin and it became obvious to people who wanted to influence the president. Oh, right. We could just buy this this thing and that will funnel money to him. He's asking us to do that. And so we say no jump. But since then, the coin is floated back down.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
I want to... Can we talk about Kemp for a second? I mean, I don't want to belabor it if it's not interesting. No, let's do it. I agree with like 95% of that. Okay. And yet, he didn't go far enough for what the moment demanded. I agree with that. I think the moment demanded more. I have sympathy for him in a way I don't for like Chris Sununu. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Because I think Kemp is weirdly more principled than Sununu. Oh, yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
No. And I wish that Kemp would have done more. I think I wrote this piece like four years ago. In a rational world, Kemp would have been the future of the Republican Party. And the fact that he's not tells you what the Republican Party is. Not only is he not the future, he doesn't have a future, really. He doesn't have a future. Mike Pence, I think, has only gotten better and doubled down on
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
So freight technologies, they publicly announced that they were going to float this bond. And simultaneously, they said that we've already put a million dollars into the Trump coin. When they did that, their stock, which has been tanking since Trump took office, spiked. So the marketplace jumped on this and said, oh, yeah, OK, well, these guys have figured it out.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
But the guy, I mean, the guy did almost everything we could ask for, with the exception of endorsing Kamala Harris, which is pretty obvious he voted for.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Mother did, at least.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Can I ask a question about it? So what is RFK's wife, Cheryl Hines? Is that her name? Yeah. Did you catch her trying to shape Trump's hand at UFC and Trump bypassed her?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
So it was very clear that he snubbed her. She wanted to shake his hand. And I just thought to myself, woman, what are you doing? Why are you eagerly trying to shake the hand of this guy who you say you hate? And, you know, you go look at mother. You go look at Karen Pence. Go look at Karen Pence. Why is Karen Pence the Republican with the most moral clarity in this moment?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Maryland. Emmitsburg, Maryland. Just over the line from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. So real Maryland.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Frank is the mayor of this town of 300, as well as the captain of the emergency medical services at the local firehouse, the Vigilant Hose Company.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
This story in NPR is filled with people in Emmitsburg who voted for Trump and love him and wanted him to cut. And Frank says, I'm probably going to get shot for this, but he's doing what he said he was going to do.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
It will change my outlook to say that they're not being fair, said Davis. They're just going to cut it and not caring what they cut. Here's what I these fucking people and I my level of contempt for the Frank Davis's of the world is boundless because his view of whether or not the Trump approach to cutting government is good or not is determined entirely by by what happens to his pet project.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
They know that they need to bribe the president and the... merely the fact that they said they were going to try to bribe the president was enough to push their stock price up. Because again, remember, they haven't succeeded in doing yet. All they've said is we're going to put together a bond offering and maybe people will give us the money to bribe him. But here's what I want to say.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Fuck you, Frank. Fuck you. You can't look around and tell that, like, if your fire school doesn't get to do in-person classes, then you will say that it's bad. You can't look at the National Institutes of Health and see the destruction of vaccine research and say that, oh, yeah, that's bad. It has to happen to you, you provincial fucking burger. You mouth-breathing serf. My God. You know what?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And this is why this country is fucked. Because idiots like this, who of course is that you've got to see this guy, the picture of this guy in his polo shirt, in his coiffed silver hair. And of course, he's the mayor of a town of 3000 people in real America. And he he will determine whether or not it is good that Trump is doing things like making it so that firefighters can't be taught how to.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Fight emergencies? Because this place is, as they say, it's like the Army War College for firefighters. And, you know, another Trump voter who looks at this and says, we are – this is another guy, Dennis O'Neill, another Trump voter –
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
who says that the National Fire Academy takes men and women out of their comfort zone and exposes them to real serious tragedies and forces them to work through what kind of decisions they're going to make. We are on a very long, slow path to self-destruction, he says.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Every day that this training is unavailable to the locals is one day closer to a disaster they can't handle or won't know how to handle. But if Trump decides that they get an exception... Then everything will be fine. Well. Because the world doesn't exist outside of their field of vision. And here's what bothers me the most. Tell me, girl. Cook.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
The populist view is that it is the elites who are cloistered and who can't see beyond their own border. And it's the old New Yorker cover, right? Where it's like, you know, the Hudson River and then New Jersey and then like a little bit of blank space, then California, right? It's like, oh, these people can't see outside their bubbles.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
No, you know who has the biggest fucking bubbles in the world? The people of Emmitsburg. These are the people who are so provincial and so cloistered that they have no idea what is happening outside of their field of vision. And yet they are the ones who determine the future course of the American empire. Great, great, good fucking job, guys. Let me read one more.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
John Beck, who serves as fire chief of the Waynesboro Volunteer Fire Department nearby in Pennsylvania, has applied for a weekend leadership and development course at the academy in July. It would be his first one, but he doesn't expect it'll happen now. He also says that online courses don't cut it. Beck, who runs a landscaping company, works for free as fire chief.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
He voted for Trump and supports cutting waste and making government smaller. But Beck doesn't see how training first responders is wasteful. We're only 100 days plus in, Beck said of Trump's current term. I wish things were going differently. Beck doesn't regret his vote yet. I'm not 100% there yet, he says, but it may not take much more. Mr. Beck? Look around you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
They've already lost money. So they put a million dollars, they say, they've put a million dollars into the coin, but the coin has lost. It's gone from like $13 to $10. So they're already down 30%.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Look around what is happening to America. Look at USAID. Look at the kids in Africa who are dying because they can't get medication. Look at what is happening to soybean farmers who don't have places to sell their crops. Whether or not you get there should not be dependent upon what happens in your tiny, insignificant slice of America. The world is bigger and more important than you, sir.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And I'll be happy so I won't pretend And I'll be telling that you're going down
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
But the point in all of this is that the markets are reacting to all of this stuff as though the only thing that is real is the corruption. Right. And the actual reality of whether companies have lost money in the bribes or whether the Trump coin is down or up or whether they'll be able to get securitized debt or bonds or anything, that stuff is immaterial. The market is simply reacting to...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Oh, yeah, finally, somebody understands that they have to bribe the president if they want to stay in business. Therefore, this company we can reward with a slightly higher stock price because they now understand the new American economy.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
You know, what's funny is there's, there's one outlier in all of this and that's crypto. Yeah. Right. And on, on crypto, uh, this administration wants to be way out into the future. Total deregulation. Total deregulation really unleashed the animal energies, right, of the animal spirits of the crypto, which of course is perfect because crypto is nothing, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
It is, of course, Trump would be into crypto because crypto is just air. Like there is nothing there. It's hype. It's what he's good at. Right. Right. And there's no underlying value. And here's the thing, Tim, we're going to talk about corruption at some point. Yeah. It's easy to understand it through the lens of just naked corruption.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
It's harder to understand at the level of just mass destruction of the American economy because that's coming.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Yeah, the mass destruction driving the dollar down, the dollar is down against every major world currency. It's down significantly against some of them. The Asian currencies are getting stronger.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
There are some guys in logistics like Ryan Peterson from Flexport have been sounding the alarm on this, saying that the end result of this is that China is going to wind up buying American companies out of bankruptcy. And that this entire scheme is going to end up with China leading the world order. Well, that's exciting.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
I guess, I guess I found it. Do you get any child? I found it hard. Honestly. Um, I have found it hard to take joy in normal things because in the back of my mind is like, Oh, things might not be okay.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
It makes Jared's stuff look respectable. Yeah, high class. Right, high class. And it makes Jared look smart. Like, you know, Jared Kushner only looks smart standing next to the Trump boys. So here's one of the things that I find interesting. Trump's first administration had massive corruption, but it was on a very bespoke level.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
scale it was like handcrafted artisanal construction so for instance donald trump owned an office building in san francisco 555 california street and one of the tenants there was the qatari government which rented an entire floor of office space and just left it empty Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Qatar knew that they had to get him a cut and they wanted to get Donald Trump a taste that he would listen to them and be amenable to them. So they would rent an office space in a floor of a building he owned. People who were coming to visit D.C. and were going to conduct business with the federal government knew that they needed to stay at the Trump Hotel across the street.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
But I mean, how much money are you really getting there? I mean, the rack rate on a hotel room there is like, what, $850, maybe $1,300 for a nice room, office space. And plus, there's all these other middlemen taking cuts out of it, right? You've got to pay tax on it. Trump 2.0 realized that you could industrialize and take to scale corruption if you owned platforms and currencies.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
Because then people don't need to physically currency currencies. People don't need to actually show up at a physical location to deliver you the bags of money. And they can do it at the scale of billions of dollars at a time. They could say, yeah, we're going to conduct a business using $2 billion of your currency and you'll get whatever the blockchain percentage says of it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1036: Jonathan V. Last: An Economic Tsunami Is Coming
And I wonder, Tim, if there's any going back. If the future of corruption in America, if everybody will aspire to that level then, and it'll no longer be enough to be Hunter Biden painting, doing a Jackson Pollock and then charging somebody $100,000 for it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And truly the biggest takeaway is just that he doesn't give a fuck. He just doesn't care about these people at all.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
You know, he's just the epitome of an absolute power hungry striver. And you don't look, that's how he's gotten to where he is from humble beginnings through just relentless attention to upward advancement. And he's not going to stop being that person now.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Well, that's so that's two bonus segments that listeners can look forward to me and Jonathan mystery science theater looking at watching old Republican speeches and me responding to Ross Douthat and JD Vance after I have a couple cigarettes to like try to keep even. Depending on where you live, sometimes it's a little risk finding good quality seafood.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to have back at the show, staff writer at The Atlantic, writing about American politics and policy and triggering John Podoritz and the far left daily. It's Jonathan Chait. What's happening?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I don't know if you've got a great fishmonger, maybe, if you're in Iowa. And our newest sponsor gives you a great solution no matter where you live. If you're looking for high-quality fish, it's the Wild Alaskan Company. It's the best way to get wild-caught, perfectly portioned, nutrient-dense seafood delivered directly to your door. You haven't tasted fish this good.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I've got to tell you, a little behind the curtain for you. A lot of these sponsors will send me a little something to test out, you know, so I can endorse it in goodwill. So I'm not BSing you guys. But a lot of times just, you know, it's just a little something, which is nice. I appreciate all gifts. It wasn't the case for Wild Alaska. They sent me like more fish.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It was like Jesus just quintupling the fish and the loaves in my home. It was a bounty. There was Pacific halibut, coho salmon. There was some fish I'd never even heard of before. And so I'm opening on my front porch and one of my neighbors walks by. And she's like, what you got there? More fish than I know what to do with. And so I was like, do you want some? So gave some fish to the neighbor.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
She cooked it that night. Was raving about it the next day walking down the street. So it is not just my endorsement, but it is an endorsement of the entire neighborhood. These fish is nutrient rich and full of flavor. It's frozen off the boat to lock in taste, texture, and nutrients like omega-3s. You can try it risk-free, 100% money-back guarantee.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
If you're not completely satisfied with your first box, Wild Alaskan Company will give you a full refund, no questions asked, no risk, just high-quality seafood. Not all fish are the same. Get seafood you can trust. Go to wildalaskan.com slash bulwark for $35 off your first box of premium wild caught seafood. That's Wild Alaskan. There's an N on the end there.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Wildalaskan.com slash bulwark for $35 off your first order. Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. I wanted to get to the politics of this. Time to turn to the Democrats a little bit. The Democrats all voted against this, of course, except for the fact that there are three Democrats that have died this year. It's hard to talk about this without being too macabre or crude.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And so obviously nothing but sympathies for the families of Sylvester Turner, Raul Grijalva, and Jerry Connolly. But – They're all over 70, and they're all running in safe Democratic districts. Jerry's maybe a little bit less so, but generally they all have been replaced by younger Democrats. And Republicans probably still jam this through.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
that they get them like right they only got it by one vote yesterday two republicans didn't show up to the vote two republicans voted against so you know they would have had to twist an arm uh tom massey is a crazy son of a bitch so he probably was never going to vote for it but you know maybe uh who's the other guy voted against it davidson of ohio so you know republicans probably still get this passed even if the all of the democrats were there
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I'm so glad to be on your show again, Tim.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Yet, it's hard to talk about this, especially in the context of Biden, without just talking about the fact that the Democrats, once again, made this easier on them than they needed to.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It's good to have you. So we have passed, the House, rather, has passed by one vote, what they've termed the Big Beautiful Bill. Sarah Longwell and Bill Kristol are trying to rebrand as the big fugly turd. And I guess you have an article out this morning about how it's the largest upward wealth transfer in American history.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I think what this points to is just a broader cultural problem within the Democratic Party's leadership class. When you're a public servant, the responsibility you have is to the American public. You affect hundreds of millions of lives in this country and around the world. That is an awesome responsibility.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
That responsibility should dwarf whatever feelings you have about your own life and your own satisfaction. What you should be thinking when you wake up every day is, how can I maximize my choices to benefit the broader world given the How many people depend on my choices? And time and time again, old people in these jobs have chosen to put their own life satisfaction ahead of the broader good.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
They've decided, you know, my life won't have as much meaning if I step aside and let some younger person take this job. That's what Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided. That's what Dianne Feinstein decided. That's what Joe Biden decided. That's what all these old Democrats who actuarially stand a high chance of dying in office at an important time.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I'm not saying everyone over 65 needs to automatically retire. But the older you get, the easier this choice gets. And they just don't care enough about the country to make the right choice. And I think it's a cultural problem in the party that people need to get tougher about discussing openly and not be held back by, oh, we need to be sensitive to their feelings.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And, oh, they've served us so long and the poor old guy.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
You make a really good distinction there. Because sometimes this, you know, the pushback is, oh, this is ageist and we need to respect our elders. If you want to work till you die, I'm for that. I don't care. I mean, I understand. Maybe it's smarter to want to spend some of your golden years with your grandchildren. All this is a personal choice.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
If you started a PR firm and some 30-year-old young buck is trying to kick you out... Fight back. Keep working. I don't care. It doesn't matter what you do. Whatever you need to feel fulfilled, I'm for. This is public service. And this was my thing with the Biden thing the whole time. And I wrote several columns about this. This is not about you. This is not about your legacy.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Your legacy is 100% immaterial to anyone except for you and Jill and And your grandkids like that's it. And so and frankly, you're harming it by what you're doing. But like there's just has been so much focus on all of that rather than focus on this is public service. The threats are very great right now. And as a leader, you need to do what is in the public interest first.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And, you know, I just think that you pointed that out perfectly. And then you add into that just. The fact that there's been no, I think finally the pressure is starting to build for the Democrat leadership class to reconsider this. Because just the idea that after the Biden catastrophe, that Jerry Connolly won a leadership battle against AOC to run the oversight committee, it was preposterous.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Why don't we just get your overall reaction, then we'll kind of go through the policy and politics of it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It was preposterous at the time. I'm not on the AOC 2028 bandwagon. Objectively, AOC was the right person to lead oversight against this administration, not somebody that had health issues.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And she was good on that committee. I mean, the things you and I might not love about AOC were not germane to her performance on that committee. Correct. Because that committee was not about Medicare for all. It was not about foreign policy. It was just about the blocking and tackling of working really hard and communicating Republican corruption to the country. And she's really good at that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It's pretty shocking in a way that Republicans were willing to absorb the political and economic risks that this legislation is going to cause them. The political risks of combining two unpopular things, tax cuts for the rich and Medicaid cuts, and the economic risks of blowing up the deficit at a time when
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I guess just since we're here and we're doing the Biden book tour, do you have any additional Biden thoughts you want to share? And have any of the revelations from the past week brought any nuance or color to your views or same as it ever was?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
You know, I have contradictory thoughts. I think a point that you made is that like the cover up thing is real to the extent that people around Biden understood how limited he was and they were working to keep that hidden. But they thought he was going to go on the debate stage and win. They didn't put him up on the debate stage because they thought he was demented.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
They thought he was going to win. So it's very hard to reconcile the most extreme kind of cover up scenario with that. That said, I think if you look back on the way liberals were discussing Biden all along and even after the debate. There's a real internal culture problem we had where it was hard to say this guy shouldn't be the candidate we're going to lose. Like I wrote those pieces.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And when I wrote those pieces, I would get slammed over and over again. Right. You've got, you know, an audience capture problem. You've got social media dynamics that make people hesitant to say what they know. And like, wouldn't it be easier just to write the column online?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
or to make the point about the thing that all my audience is going to like hearing and not the thing that they don't like hearing. And when enough people do that, it prevents you from correcting real mistakes in your own position, and then you lose, and then that feels a lot worse.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And I hope people learn the right lesson, which is like an open culture where people can actually identify mistakes on their side and say them without getting slammed by their own side and treated as the enemy is ultimately a healthier culture.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And within any organization, dissent within an organization is helpful, right? Like everybody's saying, yes, sir, Mr. CEO, sir, like is a path to Enron. Right. You know, you can just look at any organization, right? Like that's a healthy organizational culture aligned dissent. Also, why don't we give a quick shout out to some of our elders too?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
There are, you know, benefits and threats to every situation. While as a public servant in a safe blue district, maybe it doesn't make sense for you to be 77 years old with health issues and running again. Maybe it's better for you to have a younger person replace you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
In the pundit class, it seems like there was some value actually in being, you know, a semi-retired person because David Axelrod and James Carville and Bill Kristol They weren't worried about what people said about them. They're old and curmudgeonly. And they were able to actually say the truth. Yeah, right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
That a lot of people who, you know, were maybe hoping that they could get invited to the 2025 White House Christmas party weren't. And so, you know, there's a role in life for everybody, I guess, is one lesson for this. Maybe no role for Mike Donilon and his $4 million payout that he got to fucking ruin the country. So, boots to you, Mike Donilon.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
One other quick thing on age, or I guess maybe it's more acuity. You wrote about this. There's this Fetterman saga. that I was like somewhat wrapped into just because I interviewed him and, and I was like, he is just not, not capable of doing these kinds of interviews. And I had to treat him with kid gloves.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Interest rates are high and rising, and interest payments are already a trillion dollars a year, and the recovery is teetering from the trade war. To me, the argument I make in this piece is that just shows the level of ideological commitment they have to the project of shrinking redistribution. And that's really been the major theme of my writing since I started in journalism.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I felt like, like some people, some listeners were like, why didn't you go harder at him on that? And I was like, Felt like arguing with a second grader. You know, I didn't want to be too mean. And so I said that after the interview. And that got included in this big, the first Ben Terrace article about Fetterman. And there's been this like backlash now.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
You know, the Republicans are, you know, on the right, there's been a lot of commentators. And on Fox, like coming to Fetterman's defense.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
be like his mental acuity is fine and the left is just coming for him because he took a pro Israel position and I don't know how that squares with the bulwark coming for him but whatever because you guys hate Israel so much yeah so anyway I don't know what if you have any additional thoughts on the Fetterman saga
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I mean, I wrote a piece about it. You can read it in The Atlantic. And I tried to just go through this argument step by step. So I'm not going to recapitulate the whole thing. But number one, the position the Republicans are taking on this makes absolutely no sense. The main person who's testified about Fetterman's mental state is his chief staff, right? It's Adam Jentleson, a friend of mine.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Adam Jentleson has complained about the woke staffers. When the woke staffers were attacking Fetterman's Israel position, he was slapping them down and saying he got elected, you didn't get elected. So the idea that Adam Jentleson is complaining about Fetterman's health because Adam Jentleson is upset about Fetterman's Israel position is implausible.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And what I wanted to point out in this piece is that the Republicans are literally doing the exact same thing that the Biden dead-enders were doing, which is just disregarding extensive evidence that this public servant has lost cognitive ability because it's inconvenient for their position to make that admission.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And it's just remarkable that when they knew they were coming into this big public debate about Biden's fitness, they had a test case to show that actually we're better than you, Hacks. We're willing to admit it when a guy we like is sick. And they all flunked the test.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
100% of them flunked the test because they get some marginal value out of Fetterman, you know, casting a vote for Pam Bondi and saying a nice thing about Trump and being pro-Netanyahu.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
By now you've heard about the game-changing product that I use before a night out with drinks. It's called pre-alcohol. Let's face it, after a night out with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used to. I got to make a choice. I can either have a great night or a great next day. That was until I found pre-alcohol.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
ZBiotics pre-alcohol probiotic is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's a buildup of that byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for rough next days after drinking.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Pre-alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre-alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Got back into the Z-Biotics game last week because I knew it was going to be a big night. I got invited to a sushi dinner. Here in New Orleans.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And it was one of those omakase deals where you have like nine courses, nine very small Japanese courses. But then they give you a sake shot to pair with each course. And I availed myself of all those sake shots. So, you know. Zbiotics pre-alcohol came in huge the next day.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Summer's here, which means more opportunities to celebrate the warm weather before that backyard barbecue, a glass of pinot, watching the sunset at the beach, or cocktail by the campfire. Don't forget your Zbiotics pre-alcohol. Drink one before drinking and wake up feeling great. Go to zbiotics.com slash the bulwark.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
To learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use TheBullwork at checkout, ZBiotics is backed with 100% money-back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to ZBiotics.com slash TheBullwork and use the code TheBullwork at checkout for 15% off.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
There's some other context just in the kind of what was happening during the Biden administration that relates to the big, beautiful turd. And that was like the Inflation Reduction Act and how they tried to implement it. So while we're doing intrademocratic debates, maybe let's get abundance pilled here. There's some discussion that the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, they were...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
The Republican Party's just absolutely implacable commitment to shrinking redistribution. They just hate when the government taxes rich people to give money to people who aren't rich. They think it's just wrong. It's unfair at a cosmic level. And they'll do anything they can to roll it back. And that's what they're doing now.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
ostensibly trying to rush some of the money out so that Republicans couldn't claw it back had Republicans won. But it turned out that was a big failure.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I have a big piece coming out of the magazine this weekend about the abundance agenda that I hope people will have a chance to read over the weekend. What people discovered basically in the final stages of passing this signature legacy bill for Biden is the same thing that Barack Obama discovered in the early stages of passing the stimulus.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
There's no such thing as shovel-ready jobs, is what Obama said. And what that really means is that we have made it so time-consuming for the government to build anything that it can't be done at scale and in a reasonable time. Obama's whole idea when he came in is like, we're going to do what Roosevelt did during the Depression, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
We're going to put everyone to work by building all these big infrastructure programs. And that's what they did in the 30s, and it was successful. But they said, we can't do that. We could do it in the 30s. We can't do it anymore because now the permitting and all the hoops you have to jump through will take so many years.
The Bulwark Podcast
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The recession is going to be over by the time we actually put anyone to work.
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In the 30s, they weren't worried about the rare grouse that was like habitat that was going to be affected.
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Right. No, they built the Empire State Building in a year.
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Right? They built these giant infrastructure programs with worse technology way faster than – You've got a Trader Joe's going in down the block.
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I feel like that's going to be in by 2027. Yeah.
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Exactly. Right. So then they just kind of forgot this whole lesson. It was just like, well, that sucks. I wish it was different. And then they did another gigantic infrastructure bill. They get to the final stages and they say, oh, wait, you actually can't build stuff in this country. That's a problem. And one analysis said the whole –
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purpose, or at least the main purpose of the IRA was to get greenhouse gas emissions down, right? We're going to build out green energy. We're going to put people to work. It's going to serve all these purposes, right? They're going to be in these battery factories, these car factories, these new power plants. They're going to have jobs.
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They're going to love Joe Biden because Joe Biden gave them these jobs. We're going to get emissions down. But they said 80% of the emissions reductions projected in this bill will not materialize if we can't fix permitting in this country. So they tried to fix permitting. And you know who blocked them among them?
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One thing was Republicans because Republicans were so mad that they raised taxes on the rich in this bill. They said, like, we're going to make this bill fail because you violated our moral precept to bring this back to point one. But point two, the environmental groups, almost all the environmental groups lobbied to block the permitting bill.
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Because they are so committed to this 1970s Ralph Nader era agenda of blocking everything the government does in paperwork that they can't get their heads around the fact that the situation has changed and what you actually need to do to save the environment is build stuff and not prevent the building of stuff.
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not to in any way, you know, minimize the work that you've been doing in journalism, talking about the Republicans love for tax cuts for the rich for the past couple of decades. It does feel like this is the worst example of it for a variety of reasons. Like one, it is happening at a moment where they're like,
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So a huge part of the abundance agenda came out of this realization that the choices that liberals especially have made in the past have prevented us from doing the things we want to do today. So you have to almost completely reverse your old mentality in order to do the things you want to do. And getting people to reverse their mentality is hard work.
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But that's what the abundance agenda is about.
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It is hard work. You know, who's out there in the streets doing it is Ezra Klein. What have you made of Ezra's heel turn? And this was your space. Do you feel a little jealous, you know, that Ezra's out there doing with Sam Sater and like getting shouted down by, you know, all the liberals that loved him when he was, you know, starting Vox? And what do you make about kind of like dark Ezra?
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Ezra doesn't love being hated like most people. I kind of do.
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I kind of enjoy being – Maybe that's why people have moved on for you because haters don't love hating people that don't mind being hated. Haters want to get under the skin.
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No, it's true. So Ezra's really, I mean, Ezra's a brilliant writer. I've loved his work since he started. His work is better than ever. And I feel like he tries to keep things as civil as he possibly can. But in a way, it's become impossible for him because he's hit this red line. He's really challenged progressive dogma for many people at such a fundamental level that
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That they need to do the only thing they ever do when their ideas are challenged, which is to demonize the person who's challenging them and say that person's a terrible, evil person who's our enemy. I mean, you should never listen to a single word he says. So he's really struck this raw nerve within the left that it's been fascinating to see because he's the nicest guy on earth.
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And convincing people to hate Ezra Klein is a hard task, but people are trying it anyway.
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I convince people to be a little annoyed by him. Maybe it would be easier, but hate is tough. He's such a sweetheart. I feel that we discussed earlier, going back to our top topic, maybe some of the blind spots and some of the limitations of being a former Republican commentating on the news of the day. And I'm open to the fact that I've got some of those.
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I've been working through them slowly but surely. There's also some clarity, though. Just the Biden thing last year and this now, this Ezra kerfuffle. I look at it and I'm like... Have all these people lost their mind? And like, Ezra is not saying anything that is just not as obvious as the sun rises in the East or like LeBron James is a good basketball player.
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It's like California is a blue state controlled by Democrats and they have the highest cost of living. It's challenging for middle-class folks. They are unable to build a train.
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and that's a problem and there's they have a homelessness crisis and that's a problem and california should try to fix it like that's like really all he's saying i mean you could kind of some abundance has a lot of detailed policy walk nerd stuff but his overarching point you could summarize in a tweet and a very obvious one and it's pretty i guess it's kind of alarming to me that it's even controversial people don't like being told that they're the problem
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No one likes that. And what abundance does is it points at the progressive movement and says, we are the problem. The things we did in the 1970s are causing us to fail today. We have to change our mentality. And a lot of people are still invested in those ideas. And one of the points I try to make in this piece that I'm writing, that obviously you haven't seen, hasn't come out yet.
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trying to brand themselves as a kind of a populist working man's rebrand so it is in direct conflict to the actual messaging that they're putting forth you know i mean say what you want about the tenets of reaganism he was pretty unapologetic about this so that's one so it's there is a dishonesty to it yeah but also just the economic situation that we're in
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We're just teasing people now.
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Pretty much all of our listeners are already Atlantic subscribers because this is the official home of The Atlantic, the official podcast home of The Atlantic, so I'm sure they'll be able to read it. It's true. If there are any who are not, go subscribe to The Atlantic. Eventually, Jeff Goldberg will give me a 10% vig on all those subs, but it hasn't happened yet.
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I'm sure it will. People talk about the groups, right? That's part of the discourse within the left is the role of the progressive groups in creating this infrastructure where every group has its position that it holds to and it gets all the other groups to hold to it. And that's what's pushed the party to the left over the last 10 years. Ralph Nader pretty much invented that.
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He invented the groups. He invented all these groups that came in to DC to lobby for their individual position. The whole idea that we're, he called them like a new class of citizen that we're inventing this, this professional activist group. So like, this is a gigantic part of the progressive movement infrastructure that has a stake in the,
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in this set of laws that the abundance movement is trying to change. So it's not a small thing that they're trying to revise. It's really the entire orientation of the progressive movement.
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Somebody who's been making these cases for 30 years, the neoliberal shill who has, you have college aged kids, not college, right? We're in college.
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That's right. And so you're in touch with what's happening with the youth a little bit, just from a parenting perspective. do you ever kind of sit back and be like, why are we so unpopular? I just, I got, it's hard to kind of understand, right?
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Because we being the neoliberal, neoliberal Democrats, right?
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Like it's like the, there is, there's this huge, like negative reaction, you know, online. It's like the mega folks, like we need to tear everything down. And the young online leftists like we need we need to totally reject all of these leaders that have got us to this place and instead, you know, go to our perfect socialist future.
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And I just I kind of like look at the arc of the last 50 years and think, I don't know, things are pretty good. I can understand why you're mad if you live in Youngstown. But it's not like Venezuela over here or Argentina. Things directionally have gotten better since our grandparents were kids. What do you think is the reason that the Ezra Jonathan Chait view is being rejected by the youth?
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I mean, that's a really big, profound question. I think to the extent you want to focus on youth, I sort of buy the theories of Jonathan Haidt, who is not me, let alone, in fact, a completely different person.
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Just one different letter. No, two different letters, I guess.
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A couple different letters. He's got a D. I don't have a D. I have a C. But the social media – has caused this kind of negative affect and mental health difficulties. And in a lot of this radical politics on the right and the left,
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really is, at some level, it shades into mental illness in a way that is sometimes difficult to distinguish one from the other, where you just view everything in hyperbolic negative terms and refuse to look at practical steps you or the world can be taking to make the situation better. It's cognitive behavioral therapy in reverse. I think that's
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Right now, like the given the massive, as you just mentioned, the interest payments on the debt that we're making, given the fact that what we've seen from the bond markets about how it's, it's really impacting people's lives in a way that the debt and deficit wasn't, you know, during some of these past tax fights, right? Like people who have car loans, home loans, student loans, right?
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in a lot of these spaces, I think it's gotten better actually since Elon broke Twitter by mistake. But just even saying that like, hey, I'm kind of like happy, makes people angry. Because if you're like a happy, normal, well-adjusted person, that means you don't know how terrible the world is and you're insensitive to all the problems out there.
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And people have actually built political movements around that whole way of thinking and expressing yourself. And it's It's totally impossible, right? It's just unworkable. It's not a practical way to make the world better.
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I think there is this nostalgic idea on the left that you old Republicans are not burdened by, that there's something noble in being a protester who shouts and screams and exaggerates and carries on, because even if you're not technically right, you're pushing things in the right direction. I think, you know, vestigial Republicans like yourself understand that that's actually not always the case.
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And oftentimes you just convince people that you're crazy and they shouldn't listen to anything you say.
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Yeah. I was with you on the, on the cell phone answer. I don't know if the protest answers, right. Cause it, cause I've been talking about this a lot on my Gen Z pod. Like there's actually, it's kind of a surprising lack of protest among young folks on the left right now. Yeah. Right. And so the allure to that might be more of a,
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generational thing about your peers who are out there in these streets. And we appreciate that. That's true.
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And we appreciate that. That's true. That's true. My people will at least leave the house. Young people just want to do it all on the phone.
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Yeah. I don't know. We could probably do a whole podcast on it. But I think it's just a big challenge, right? What Ezra is pushing for and Derek seems to have an appeal to basically upper middle class college educated folks. And it is not...
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resonating beyond like I saw a little image of some of the abundance meetups and it's exactly you know it looks exactly what you think it look like and God love all the folks at those meetups some of them probably broadcast listeners we'd probably hang out and agree on a lot of things but in the social media age where all of that you know catastrophizing is winning and
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you know, how do you make the argument that like, well, guys, some of these radical changes might make things worse, not better. Like, have you seen China? Like all of those arguments are a little bit, it's tough. And like, honestly, maybe it's just cyclical and like letting the populace fuck things up for a while is the only path back. I don't know.
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I mean, the irony is the biggest piece of it and the oldest piece of the abundance agenda is housing, right? We should build more housing. Like, look, I'm 53. I bought into the housing market in the 90s when it was, you know, the cost of what's now like a nice cup of coffee at Starbucks, right? And so, like, the young people – like, I don't need it. Like, I own – I own a house now.
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If anything, I stand to lose from building more housing and devaluing the cost of property, of which I'm already an owner. It's the young people who actually need to allow more housing to be built. And the only way to do that is to legalize it. But no, you're right. And the other aspect of it is that abundance agenda, like I said, when it says who's the bad guys, the bad guys in many cases is us.
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Like the interest rates are rising in a way that's squeezing a lot of middle class people. It is happening, you know, in a way like after we've had several of these already. The Reagan the Reagan tax cut like took a top tax rate for a very high level down to a lower level. Right. There was one one increase since then. And so and it's been brought back down then by Trump.
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Or the bad guys... isn't a corporation. It's that when you want to build a new apartment building, you have to get approval of some neighborhood planning commission. And they're going to listen to the four 75-year-olds who've lived there for 50 years who want to show up and complain about how they don't want anything to change in the neighborhood.
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And they get to veto the whole prospect and tie it up in lawsuits if they get cranky about it. And those bad guys aren't as compelling to some people as a bad guy who's a giant wealthy corporation. But they're bad.
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Yeah. There's some bad corporations and some bad geriatrics that aren't letting people move into the neighborhood. Hey, guys, it's Tim and Sarah. We're here with my frenemy, John Lovett from Love It or Leave It.
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You are definitely the fucking self-important one. June is Pride Month, and we're going to be live in D.C. on June 6th for World Pride for a very special live show fundraiser featuring the three of us, plus some gay special guests.
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Speaking of radicalism gone awry, this is just such a fucking horrible story. Two Israeli embassy staff were fatally shot at the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. yesterday. Yaron Lashinsky and Sarah Milgram, they're engaged. They're about to be married.
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The suspect, I guess suspect is the term that we have to use, but the guy that did it was chanting, free Palestine and globalize the intifada while being taken into custody. I don't even really know what to say about this beyond the fact that it is so it's just fucking self-sabotage, this radicalization that you're saying that could lead to something like this.
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But it's pretty alarming that this stuff keeps going on. And it's unfortunate that we have kind of this fake anti-Semitism agenda being put in place by this administration when there's like actually real issues there.
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Right. The administration is stocking up with right-wing anti-Semites and using anti-Semitism as a pretext to crack down on peaceful demonstrators, often with very unobjectable views. At the same time, a lot of these demonstrators have very radical, very dangerous views. I mean, globalize the Intifada. This is what it means.
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If they wanted to say, let's just get people around the world to speak up peacefully, they could say that. But that's not what globalizing the Intifada means. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab means that there won't be any Jews anywhere in the state of Israel. There won't be a state of Israel. I mean, these...
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Groups actually are fairly tightly organized and disciplined, and they're loyal to Hamas. They won't denounce Hamas. They won't denounce 10-7, because that is actually what they believe. They attract a lot of people who are just motivated to help the Palestinians who are suffering horribly. So many of the people who are attracted to these protest groups have noble motives that I share.
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But the causes into which they're joining are often... bloody ones that we should be honest about describing.
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And all of these things can be true. What's happening in Gaza right now is almost as bad as it's been the whole time. What is happening in Gaza is blocking food from getting into Gaza. Young children and babies are dying in Gaza as we speak. These are not Hamas toddlers. These are just toddlers.
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It's gone back and forth. It's gone back and forth with the government.
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They're being held hostage by Hamas. Yeah.
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And so, you know, there are valid reasons to protest and to speak out about the atrocities there. But it's very obvious to anybody seeing this clearly how often that bleeds into the type of anti-Semitic rhetoric that can take a person to the place where they feel like the right thing to do is to randomly shoot people outside of a capital Jewish museum.
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So, you know, I mean, we're doing it just at a moment where it is. on the merits, the least called for and potentially damning and where the politics of it are, you know, betray a deep hypocrisy and what, what Mac is putting forth.
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Here's a point that I think I've been making. Students for Justice in Palestine... is a radical group with eliminationist goals that supports Hamas and supports violence. People should not work with that group. People should not endorse that group. You should find other ways to support the Palestinians. I don't care if they're the main group on your campus that's organizing a protest.
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Organize your own protest that's separate from them because they are bad.
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Blunt and well said. Speaking of people that are bad and eliminationist, we had another one of these fucking reality show Oval Office meetings yesterday between Trump and the president of South Africa. Trump advancing the notion that there is a white genocide happening in South Africa.
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There have been, also in the Washington Post was there have been 12 deaths, 12 murders on farms in South Africa, which is not good. But there were 6,900 murders in South Africa last year, right? So we just have to contextualize all this that's happening. Nice note from a South African who just, you know, wanted to make sure that it is important to contextualize this administration in South Africa.
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There's some bad laws that are being put in place. There's some race-based laws that are being put in place that are pernicious. But like in the grand scheme of things, the idea that the white farmers, the Afrikaners in South Africa. are like the only victims in the world that we should care about.
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And that the United States president should browbeat the president of South Africa in the Oval Office a week after sucking the cock of MBS is obviously motivated by racial animus. Like it's just obvious what Trump is doing here. And so anyway, you've written about this. I wonder if you have any other thoughts.
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Right. One of the columns I wrote last week was that I was trying to make an old New Republic counterintuitive argument. Watch out.
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No slate pitches on the Bulwark podcast.
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Radical candor here.
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The New Republic invented it. Yeah. Before Slateway existed, the slate pitch was the New Republic. Okay. Anyway, when Trump flew to Saudi Arabia, he basically – he gave a speech where he was saying like we're not here to moralize. We're just about making business deals with people and that's what our foreign policy is about. I think a lot of people took that idea completely at face value.
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But my argument is actually they do have a values-based foreign policy. J.D. Vance has gone to Europe and he's lectured people about their immigration policies and about their free speech policies and about letting AFD have more access to the political system, their policies. They've lectured South Africans on their treatment of white farmers.
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So I agree with you on the economics. I disagree with you on the politics. So why don't I start where I agree and then, and then we'll move to the disagreement. So I'll give you a chance to push back. On the economics, you're right. I mean, the interest rates have been low since Bill Clinton came in.
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Their concepts of democracy and free speech and human rights are very important to their foreign policy. So they have values, but their values are bad. It's not amoral, it's immoral foreign policy. And I think it actually gives them too much credit to assume that it's pure commerce-based, just making money and making deals. Trump's dealings with the Gulf are corrupt. They are money-based.
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But there is a shared value system. I mean, he genuinely admires... the authoritarian character of these regimes. He loves the fact that he can go there and no one is allowed to protest against him and that, you know, he can get his palms greased. So that's not just about making deals for the country or even for himself. It's really, you can see it in his face. He loves dictators. He admires them.
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It's a value of his. And so like it's a values-based policy, I think is an important point.
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Yeah. The pluralist countries are the foes. Yeah. It's across the board. It's like anything in life. When you have a friend or a colleague, you know what gets them excited. You can just tell. You can tell in their energy and their voice and their engagement level. Trump gets very engaged and excited when he is attacking our small L liberal allies around the world. He does not like them.
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He does not want to be in their company.
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And when they're black, all the more so.
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Yes, right. He does not really want to be in their company. Yeah. He wants to talk down to them and he enjoys erotically the company of the Middle Eastern fascists.
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And like, that's just it. I think it's a very, it is a good point. And I was making a softer version of the point yesterday by saying that like the Trump doctrine is that there is a Trump doctrine that is mercantilistic and that they're just, they just have carve outs for white people. But I'm open to the next step of that argument, which is no, it's not purely mercantilistic.
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It's also values based. It's bad values. I thought it was really, you might've pitched it as a contrarian pitch, but I liked it.
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The Canadians are mostly white. The Western Europeans are mostly white. I mean, their leaders are white and he's hostile to them because they're liberal democracies.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Bill Clinton got rid of the deficit, created a structural surplus, brought interest rates down to rock bottom levels. And he created so much headroom on the deficit that George W. Bush could blow up the deficit. Trump could blow up the deficit. Biden, to an extent, could blow up the deficit, and no one really paid a big cost for it. But that era seems to be over.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
There's this concept that's been going around that if people who are listeners who are blessedly off of the internet are probably not even going to be aware of this concept.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It's an intra right wing fight about the woke right, that there is a woke right that is themselves obsessed with race and identity and identitarianism and a similar way to how Robin DiAngelo might be, but in a way that is ill of ill intent and And so the key difference is the intent is ill, but the identitarian obsession is the same. You've kind of observed this.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I do think that this in some ways overlaps with what we saw with the South Africa discussion, too. But I don't know if you have any insight into the woke right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Right. So this is the critique that sort of originated on parts of the right that were at least open to Trump, if not completely in his camp. And then since, you know, that were basically against the illiberalism of the far left and saw Trump as a corrective to that and then realized that Trump was just recapitulating or, in my view, exceeding the illiberalism of the far left.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I would say massively exceeding the illiberalism of the far left. And so they were using the word woke to express the kind of parallel, the sort of meet the new boss, same as the old boss dynamic of this. I personally prefer illiberal or authoritarian as descriptors. But the difference between my descriptor and woke is they hate the term woke, right? It makes them so angry.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
They can't stop talking about how angry it makes them. Okay, so that's appealing.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It's appealing to use it for that reason.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
There is a real appeal, but also making them realize the degree to which they really have recapitulated the worst habits of the people they most hate. Can I repeat one of my little Twitter burns? Will Chamberlain, one of these right-wing FedSoc illiberal lawyer types who's in the Trump circle, he was really complaining about – Ed Whelan was a more traditional conservative –
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
who called Emil Bove, the Justice Department staffer, a henchman, saying, we can't promote a henchman. He says, like, how can you, is this the term we're using when we're calling him a henchman? Is that fair? And I said, like, you're right. When you're in the war, right, you got to call a hench person or person experiencing hench. That's the real nice walk right term.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
So, you know, in a way there are all these parallels, but the language policing and the conscious obsessions with race. They like to claim sometimes that we're the race neutral people, but they're not race neutral. They're very, very conscious of race.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I want to give one example of this conscious obsession with race that's really kind of tragic that I want to talk about. Just really quick though for listeners. I did a late night chat with Patrick Gaspard who was on the show a couple weeks ago who was ambassador to South Africa where we kind of went more into the details about what's actually happening in South Africa. So folks,
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
If you want to listen to that, you can go check it out either on YouTube or on the Bulwark Takes feed. Patrick's really, really good. I was noticing this more in my comment section from both the woke left and the woke right. And so I just kind of wanted to weigh in on it because it's such a tragic story. There's a story out of Mississippi, out of Starkville.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
really annoying that the cowbells at the football game, it's very annoying, but it's, it is, it's America in Starkville. Okay. Casper Erickson. Uh, he came from Denmark. Maybe he's being targeted because as part of the pressure campaign against Denmark to give up Greenland, I don't know. He came from Denmark on a cultural exchange program in high school.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
One of these things where you come and do a semester abroad, went to high school in Starkville, uh, He meets an American girl there. They fall in love. He moves back to Denmark. They're pen pals. He comes back. They decide to get married. They have four kids, one on the way. The guy tries to fill out all the firms to become an American citizen. His wife's American. His kids are American.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I'm not sure there is an economic free lunch where you can just keep issuing treasury debt. We want more people to borrow money to fund our deficits, and they'll just keep buying up those T-bills over and over again at any price. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. So we don't know what's going to happen.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I guess 10 years ago, one of the forms he did not fill out. There had been an oversight. He'd had many, many meetings with immigration in the intervening periods where they had not told him about this form that he'd forgot to fill out. He says it happened right after there was a stillbirth of their child. So there was a lot happening in the household. He went in for his immigration checkup.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
He's still going through the process like you're supposed to do to become a citizen. The fucking ICE goons shackle him. And they send him to Louisiana. He's in a cell in Natchez now. He's been there for one month awaiting deportation while his pregnant wife is at home with the four kids.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
They're charging a ridiculous amount for him to even use the phone to call her because it's a private prison that's monetizing all this. This is a fucking horrific story. And what it is is an example of just how inhumane the Trump immigration regime is across the board. There are elements of it that are racially motivated. There also are that is just a just blanket inhumanity.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And they're trying to reach their numbers. And the easiest way to reach their numbers is to take people who are doing things the right way, not criminals. It's hard to find fucking criminals.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It's easy because they're the ones who walk in the door. Exactly.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It's easy to find people who just walk in the door. And so this guy is going to be sent back to Denmark. Who knows what happens to his family? It is despicable what it is doing. It is just fundamentally un-American what we are doing, this immigration regime. And so I was grossed out by it. And then like literally my entire reply chain from left and right was about how this guy's white.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It's like, oh, lefties being like, oh, well, it's a white guy, so the Trump people let him off the hook eventually. And then it's right-wing people being like, oh, I thought that we only deported brown people. See, we also deport whites. Hell yeah. And I just like... It leads to an unhealthy culture where you're centering the skin color above everything.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Because the center of this case is the tragedy of it and the fucking horrific immigration policies that this administration is putting forth. And it makes me concerned when we are immediately leading to where people are stoking race war over things such as this. So anyway, I don't know if you have any thoughts about the story.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I don't want to say that there will be a huge crisis, but there might be, and we don't know, and it's highly risky. So on the politics, sometimes when I listen to your show and you guys talk about the past, I think, oh, this is why these guys used to be Republicans.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Yeah, I mean, I think what you're hitting on is this, the hangover of this ideology that really got very fashionable in this country for a few years, maybe peaked around 2020, which is really a kind of totalizing analysis of race, right? Like Ibram Kendi saying that literally everything is either pro-racist or anti-racist and nothing is neutral. And
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I think it began with the very correct understanding that racism left an incredibly deep and enduring imprint on American society that didn't go away when slavery disappeared and didn't go away when segregation disappeared. But in many people's minds, that has grown into just a totalistic explanation for everything.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
So it certainly impacts our immigration policy, but they have no other way of understanding anything else that could be impacting our immigration policy. And so they're driven to this totalistic frame. And so you're just left with these kind of black – I mean black and white I suppose is the wrong phrase to use. Yeah, sure.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Right. It's just absolutist analysis. It's a black and white cookie living in harmony together.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I think you need to – you not only can, but you have to recognize the impact of racism in American life while leaving yourself room to see other forces that are at play.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Yeah. And to me, this case in particular and what we're doing across the board that I just – I like to keep bringing up because sometimes just people don't think about it. Like they have a – whatever their view is about immigration, like liberal or conservative, it's not like, well, he didn't follow the rules. He should leave or, you know, well, we should be more generous. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
But like there, there are choices that are made by the government about how to handle situations such as this. You know what I mean? It's like, We could change the law where if you run a red light, you get jailed for life or you could get a ticket. There's a whole range of different punishments for things such as this.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And the notion – and this is happening across the board on these immigration detentions and every story I read about it – is that this administration, probably because the private prison lobby is the one that's making the most bank during the Trump years, private prison folks are crushing right now.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
They've made a decision that anybody who has an immigration violation, you get shackled, put on the bus, and sent to Natchez, Louisiana, or the other places where there are these private prisons, and you sit there. And that's where Malcolm Khalil is. That's where this Danish guy is.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
That's where the woman from Georgia that I've been talking about, the woman from Mexico, she got sent to one of these in Georgia. And it's like, none of these people are...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
That's refreshing. That's right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
are a danger to their community why are they in cells like there's no reason for it besides like intimidation cruelty and wanting to you know uh give widgets to your private prison pals right human widgets because like none of these folks are have any past crimes or any threats to their community and all of them you're trying to get them to leave so There's no flight risk.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
That's why you used to be Republicans.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It's not like, ooh, maybe the Danish guy will leave to Denmark. That's what you want. So it's not like there's a flight risk situation. There's no reason this man should be away from his four children. Even if in the end you do a stupid policy that I disagree with, which is to deport him. In the meantime, the idea that he should be in a prison in Louisiana is fucking insane and inhumane.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It's nice to remind people. It's nice for us to flex the old muscles. It's nice to demonstrate to people that we haven't gone fully native. That's good from time to time.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And that's the center of this. And it's happening across the board.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
My suspicion is that they recognize that actually finding and deporting all the people that they want to find and deport is not going to be possible, even after they get the money from this bill to staff up on the immigration enforcement. It's just too hard to find everyone. It's too resource intensive. I mean, doing the math on the plane loads and the bus loads of people, it's too forbidding.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I think what they're trying to do instead is to scare people. Right. You create enough high profile cases that make it into the media than anyone who's here illegally will self-deport. The cruelty is the point, as my colleague Adam Serwer said. Right. It's like the abuse is better. It's better.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And if you're getting an innocent person to mistreating them, it makes the media all the better because that's just going to be a better story for the media. It's going to travel farther and scare more people. Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is purely incompetence. And I'm sure incompetence is part of the
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
No, there's malice and incompetence and cruelty and there's just straight grift.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Yeah, I don't think they're concerned about abuse. I think abuse is really built into the plan.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Absolutely. All right. Any parting thoughts? Any, you know, recruiting, Michigan recruiting news?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Well, you know, I know you had two Michigan professors on in the last seven days and now you've got a Michigan alum on. So, you know, I love Michigan week. It's been the best week of your podcast.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
When you put on those rosy glasses and remember the good old days, this is what I like to put on my old liberal Democrat hat. A reminder that George W. Bush didn't say he was going to give rich people a huge tax cut because he thought they were productive or they deserved to keep their own money. He just lied. He said, no, no, no, the poorest people are going to get the biggest tax cut.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I'm not letting my bitterness over Bryce Underwood abandoning us for Michigan affect the guest list on the podcast, which the listeners who have no idea who Bryce Underwood is appreciate. So there you go. I do have to give a final just big condolences to friends of the pod, Timothy Chalamet and Ben Stiller and John Hamm and all the other Knicks fans.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
That was a brutal loss last night, but basketball is great, and I hope that I hope that the Knicks can rebound and make this a series. What a game that was last night.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
You don't make the choke sign after game one. You make the choke sign after game seven.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
It was a risk for Tyrese Halliburton. Hopefully, he gets his comeuppance. And I don't want to jinx the Knicks by saying I'm rooting for them. But I would like to see Tyrese get his comeuppance. All right. Jonathan Chait, always a pleasure. Thanks so much. We'll be having you back again soon. Loved it. Enjoy the Jonathan Cohn wedding this weekend. Will do.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast. Peace.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
You know, it wasn't true. Ronald Reagan was also, in many ways, selling himself as a new working man's Republican. He would, you know, speak to the unions. He would say, like, he's more populous than old... than older Republicans because it was never popular to say, I want a tax cut for the rich.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
So people are always comparing the rhetoric of whoever is a Republican now with the policies of the old. But at the time, they were never selling the policies at face value.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
We're just going to have to go through and look at some George W. Bush. We're going to have a separate bonus segment where we watch George W. Bush's 2003 speech about the second tax cut. We're going to watch the speeches about it together. And then we'll do a mystery science theater. That'll be some bonus content for the weekend. I'm not prepared to push back on that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
So I'll grant it to you for now with a caveat that we might have some bonus content later. I want to get into the policy substance of this a little bit. Just one more on the biggest picture. I thought Jared Golden's critique was pretty compelling because Jared Golden's been a craw in the eye of Democrats in a lot of ways. And he's probably been the most mansion-y in the House.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
He hasn't maybe gone full mansion, but he has been willing to buck the Democratic Party on a number of things related to working class voters in particular. And so it was interesting to see his response to this bill. He writes this, the House GOP had every opportunity to work across the aisle to write a budget that put middle class families first.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Instead, they're ramming through an extreme agenda that takes health care away from the working poor and borrows trillions of dollars to fund a package of tax cuts tilted to those at the top. Mainers want more health care, not less. They want a tax code where everybody pays their fair share. They want Congress to get its fiscal house in order. The bill fails on each of those fronts.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
So this is one of the easiest no votes I've ever taken. I would think that would be like a warning sign to some of the front line Republicans. It's like to have somebody like Jared Golden, the most frontline of the frontline Democrats, saying this is the easiest no vote he's ever taken. And yet there doesn't seem to be any concern. It's kind of full speed ahead on this.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I don't think they're not concerned. I think they're concerned. I think they're just willing to pay the price. And in a way, you have to hand it to them. Sometimes if you really care about policy, you're willing to take political risks in order to advance something you think is important.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
They think it's very, very important to throw 10 million people who are poor off their health insurance and to give wealthy people a tax cut. That is in keeping with their moral values. They're willing to pay a price for it. So you can question the values, and I do, but they're not cowards.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Is that your real view? Like you really think they – or do you think they've tricked themselves?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
No, no. I don't.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
You think that across the board, the 215 Republicans voted for this just – they have a passionate, principled commitment to throwing the working poor off their healthcare.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I mean – Yes, they have fought for decades on these principles. I mean, the Republican Party has been utterly rock solid, consistent on opposing economic redistribution for rich to poor for decades. And, you know, they paid a heavy price in the past and will continue to do so.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I'm not saying that they wish they could keep the people on health care. I guess I do think that there's more of just a straight cultish political element like straight into this. I was listening to Bannon yesterday. Bannon can, you know, use the muscle to muscle these guys into not to voting against stuff. We've seen that. I mean, Bannon basically deposed a speaker by himself with Matt Gaetz.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Right. So he didn't do that. Yeah. But still on the merits. Bannon was basically like, we should have increased taxes on the rich more. There should have been fewer cuts to Medicaid. There should have been cuts in other places so that we would have got the deficit number down. Like, that's basically the Bannon position on this.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And I feel like had Bannon been the chief of staff and had Trump tried to jam that through, I think they would have jammed it through. Do you not think that's right? You think there would have been a principled objection among House Republicans to maintaining Medicaid and letting tax rates rise on the rich? I don't know. It's a counterfactual, so I don't know.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
they've pushed in this direction. They haven't laid down the hammer, as you said, but they pushed pretty hard. They said, like, what if we just do like a small tax increase on the rich, just to give us a talking point, right? Just to give us something to say, like, hey, we raised the tax rate by two points and the rich are paying their share. It's not all the sacrifice going on the poor.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Even if the overall thrust was still very regressive, you'd still have a talking point. And House Republicans just absolutely refuse to go along with There was almost no support for that anywhere. So, I mean, I don't think they completely lack power. I think this is the deal.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
The reason the House Republicans have been willing to overlook the corruption in the authoritarianism and even some of these old line Republicans don't love that stuff, but they're willing to live with it because there is a payoff in the end. And this is the payoff. You take away that payoff and the whole bargain that holds together this party unravels.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I think there's plenty of evidence for that point. And I think you make a compelling case. Just looking at local Republican, looking at the states, there's a ton of evidence for this too. And just like what happened here in Louisiana, they passed the most insane regressive tax cut that I've ever heard of last year. It's like preposterous that they even did it. It was great for me.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
They cut the income tax, you know, for everybody. But obviously that's disproportionately favors folks towards the top. And they increased the sales tax. to pay for it. It's just a pure, straight, regressive tax. And they jammed it through, party line here in Louisiana, crazy.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
So there's a lot of evidence for you that that's- At the state and federal level, that is the central policy goal of the party.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Let's look really quick at just a couple of the policy particulars, the cuts to SNAP. 81% of recipients of SNAP live below the poverty line. About a third live below half the poverty line. They're cutting 30% from SNAP. And, you know, we'll see what kind of happens in the Senate side of this. But like a really draconian cuts to the SNAP program.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Which also hurts farmers.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Incidentally, right? Because like the people who are too hungry to eat food don't buy food. And then, you know, the people who are selling them food lose out.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
You wrote also about updating – we'll just keep trashing Reagan's legacy today. Medicaid queens. One of the amendments that they gave to the Chip Roy's of the world, who are never going to vote against this anyway, so I'm not sure why they felt like they had to give him concessions.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
But they gave some concessions to the pretend deficit hawks in the House that voted for the largest debt-busting bill ever, certainly in modern times. They moved up the work requirements for Medicaid from 2029 to 2026. You wrote about kind of this myth of the Medicaid queens. Just talk about that policy a little bit.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Jonathan Cohn wrote a terrific piece for you guys as well about this for the Bulwark.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Congrats to Jonathan Cohn, our newest Bulwark member who we love. And his son's getting married. His son's getting married. So I would have him on instead of you to talk about this. So you're going to have to talk about it in his place.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
I will be there. I'm going to witness the event. The way this policy works is that you don't technically throw people off Medicaid, or at least not directly. What you do is you impose work requirements. Now, the overwhelming majority of the people on Medicaid are are eligible so they could pass the requirement. You have to be working, you have to be of working age.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
So you have to prove that I'm too old or I have kids at home or I'm disabled or I'm working or I'm looking for a job. You have to go through these steps. And you have to go through them usually every month.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And if you've ever dealt with paperwork requirements from the government, these are like the worst version of paperwork requirements where it's like impossible to understand what they're asking for. It's impossible to get people on the phone to answer your questions. It's vague.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And we've dozed all the people that would have answered the questions previously, previous years. Right.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Right. They've tried this in two states, Arkansas and Georgia. And an experiment has proven that what it does is it throws eligible people off the program. People who are eligible who are working or otherwise eligible to receive this just can't get through the paperwork and they lose their eligibility. And then they go to the doctor and they find they can't pay for it. And then they're ruined.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Sometimes those people... had jobs and get sick and can't get treatment for getting sick and then lose their jobs as a result of the fact that they're now too sick to work. So rather than promoting employment, this actually discourages employment.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
But what it does do is cut government spending because a lot of people just lose their access to Medicaid and then that's how the government saves money. That is literally what it does. But they're going to claim that, well, we're just making, you know, 25 year olds get off the couch and stop playing video games. But that is absolutely not what these requirements do.
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S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Any other thoughts on the health care cuts? And there's some marketplace cuts, you know, some of the various ACA plans. But I mean, it's not just Medicaid folks that are going to be hurt.
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S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
Right. No, they just they literally just threw that in the last minute. I mean, it's happened so fast. We don't even have analysis of the effects of how many people are going to lose their insurance and how much the deficit is going to spike. And they just don't care. I mean, they're just they're literally just rushing it through so fast because in a sense, they don't even want to know.
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S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
The lack of caring is pretty striking. I'm going to do a separate. I haven't finished it because I have to watch it in small doses because it just I'm concerned I'm going to stroke out. And I have a young child who needs her who needs her papa. But I was watching Ross Douthat interviewed J.D. Vance.
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S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is
And it's in Rome. So J.D. had just met with the Pope. Right. So you think if there was ever a moment for the humanity and the caring of your fellow man to be overwhelming your political instincts, it might have been in that hour right after you'd met the Pope. Not the case for J.D. Vance. And they start talking about the migration issues and the immigration issues.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Does the Republican Party go back to free trade after Trump is gone? This is what I can't quite figure out. Is there an actual appetite for protectionism and tariffs? Or is that just an artifact that there is an appetite for Trumpism?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
and all the other things that Trumpism, you know, is like, like the racism and the, you know, rounding up Brown people and sending people off, you know, snatching, snatching Muslim grad students off the streets. There's an appetite for that. And if they get tariffs with that, then like, okay, they'll support it. But is there an organic place in the Republican party for this?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
And it also indicated that courts may not have the power to do so because of, quote, deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. David, this reads to me like a less good decision than some people seem to hope because it presumes a world of regular order. Tell me, what are your thoughts on this?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Well, let's talk about that. I don't think there's a way to, on any kind of near-term time horizon... put things back together again. What we're seeing right now, and here I want to talk a little bit about the bond market. What you have seen, you know, the bond market is where risk goes to hide, as William Cohen wrote earlier this week.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
And yesterday you saw the Dow lose a thousand points and the yield on the 10-year treasury bill go up, which is not supposed to happen.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Right. And what that means is that money is getting pulled out of America. Yeah. Because investors think that America has systemic risk. And I don't know how that gets fixed, except as like a generational project, right? I mean, if America is no longer a place where it is safe, really, to put it, it's no longer the ultimate safe harbor, right? The money and capital will find someplace else.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
I want to talk a little bit about another piece you wrote recently on smuggling in the black market that we will see. I hadn't really thought about this. We have this long, unpoliceable border, especially between Canada and the United States. These tariffs are real. A lot of merchandise is going to fall off the back of trucks, isn't it?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
I'm sort of struggling to even think this all the way through because it's so depressing. But that would present another vector for Trump's use of the police state, right? I mean, like at that point, we do start inching towards Stasi and lives of others and stuff, don't we?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Yeah. And once it's in, right, once the merchandise gets into the States, then stopping distribution is impossible.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
So you launched your new show, The David Frum Show, over at The Atlantic this week. You have Rahm Emanuel on as your first guest. It's a very interesting conversation. You talked a lot about Canada, too. Can you just talk to me a little bit about what it has been like personally for you to see America, your adopted country, basically take sides against Canada? You know, your home country?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
I mean, it must be horrifying. How does that work? What does that do?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Do you take Trump to be serious about this? My position is that it actually doesn't matter if he's serious or not. Because, as you say, it is Chekhov's gun. Once it's on the table, you can't unsee it. And my views of what Mark Carney said two weeks ago now, that era of deepening cooperation is over, I think that's true. And I think it has to be true, just from the view of RealPolitik.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
What are your views on this?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Do you think that Trump wants to comply with this? Because it seems to me that it's pretty easy for him to not comply if he doesn't want to. He can do one of two things. He could say no, because this is actually foreign affairs and has to do with the national security of the United States with the purview of the chief executive.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
So these are the kind of conversations which are so worth having. Please. What's your vision for the new show? So you had Rom on to start the first episode. Who are the people you're going to have on to talk with? Is it just going to be like newsmakers? Are you going to go outside of politics and talk economics?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
I mean, your interests are so wide ranging as to be like embarrassing to me because it makes me feel provincial because you're interested in everything, which is why a David Frum show just sounds like cotton candy to me.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Or he could say, I tried, I spoke to them, and I can't tell you about those discussions because of executive privilege. but it is simply not possible.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Yeah, no, go and subscribe to it. It's important.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
All right, David, thank you. Everybody else, Tim will be back on Monday. Until then, good luck, America. Bye-bye.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
And we had a ruling on that on Wednesday, which is helpful to Trump on that, right? Can you talk a little bit about this? Why would Trump feel the need to fire Powell now instead of just waiting out the end of his term? I mean, I have so many questions for you, but let's start with that one. So Trump has crashed the car.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
This stuff is also so fundamentally important, but also when you step back from it, Firing Powell or even replacing him with sycophants or replacing him with whatever the Federal Reserve version of Pete Hegseth is does seem likely to harm the markets more. Yes. Does it not? I mean, this is like this is how South American banana republics are run. And their economies are not great.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm JVL sitting in for Tim Miller and I am joined today by a longtime friend, David Frum, now a staff writer at The Atlantic and host of a new podcast, The David Frum Show on The Atlantic. David, it is fantastic to have you here with us. How are you, my friend? I'm all right. Thank you. Hello from Los Angeles. Well, thank you for being here.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Wow. Well, that's all super, super happy. Yeah. Let's talk about the tariffs. You've written a great deal about this. I don't know that we need to explain to people anymore, but I want to walk through it anyway, just because it was fun. You did a piece over at The Atlantic about the tiny little screws. You basically did just like a Surratt picture.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
We're going to zoom in and zoom in and zoom in until you can see all the little pointillism. Can you walk people through the utter insanity of the idea that manufacturing, just in all caps, comes back to America through the tiny little screws in the iPhone, the pentalobes?
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
We're going to talk about a bunch of different things because you're the best guest on this podcast all the time. Tim is the regular host, has to pretend that he doesn't have favorite guests, but I don't have to make any such things. You are the best guest.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
I think maybe don't understand is that supply chains are really just the physical manifestation of economic efficiency. And so the individual parts come from the places where it is most efficient to make them. This is how these things self-organize. And to come in and say, well, I'm going to change this, as you say, it's like you push the ball in one here, but something pops out over there.
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S2 Ep1019: David Frum: It's Too Late to Stop the Pain
Last night, we got a Supreme Court ruling unanimously on Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, the Maryland father of a special needs child who was wrongly deported down to the mega prison in El Salvador. The court ruled that the administration must facilitate his return, but it did not order it.