Patrick Gaspard
Appearances
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And I appreciate that you're starting there instead of the liberation from Liberation Day, which I'm sure will... I'm sure we'll get to it at some point.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
But look, the South African thing is something that my friends in South Africa are struggling to understand because they are so used to dealing with American politicians, Democrats and Republicans, whose agendas are kind of transparent, that are tied. to these outcomes and trade and security. And they've been responding in a very traditional way.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And it's not working because there was nothing traditional about this. So here's the first thing I'd say. The kind of miracle of Donald Trump as president of the United States in the foreign policy space is that he's managed to collapse the daylight between foreign policy and domestic political constituency.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
That's the really important thing to understand about this guy that makes him incredibly different than any president
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
I think that the only time we've ever had this kind of conflation of domestic politics with foreign policy and this kind of a way that's suffused throughout is under Eisenhower in the McCarthy era, where foreign policy was a servant to domestic politics in a way that just hasn't been since. And so for Trump, that's an important thing to understand.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And why is that relevant in the South African space? Trump's been obsessed with South Africa even before he was actually president. He would post on social media about the rights of Africana farmers.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
He would lift up all these discredited myths and narratives about the oppression of that minority in the country in ways that were shocking for anyone, black or white, that had been involved or even at the margins of of the anti-apartheid movement and that era where we understood clearly there is a white minority that was oppressing a black majority in South Africa.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Not the story that Trump told before or during his first presidency or in this new period. And right now, even though white South Africans make up about 7% of the total population, They control over 70% of the private land that's available in the country for farming, for business development, etc. It's an astonishing ratio.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
The government has been trying to solve for that challenge when you have a population overwhelmingly black, poor population. that has experienced a political revolution and transformation in the country, but not an economic transformation. So they get Blacks more into the center of the economy to try to solve for that disparity and that land challenge.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
They did so by moving a piece of legislation, not without controversy in South Africa, around the reappropriation of land that is not being used.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
So I want to be clear, this is not land that white farmers are sitting on top of, but land that's not being used and the appropriation of that land would have to go through all kinds of bureaucratic procedures in order for the government to be able to secure it for new purposes. Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who, of course, is a South African expat.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Peter Thiel, another South African expat that's in that circle, obsessed.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
David Sachs, another one. There are a number of men who kind of lift up this false story about the oppression of white people in South Africa, because I believe for Trump. It actually speaks to a domestic French political audience that has its own obsessions around a grievance politics that's tied to supremacy movements and replacement theory. So all this stuff is in service of that politics.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
He seizes on this new legislation that's passed in South Africa as a result of this. We're going to blow up the trade relationship, the security relationship between the two countries. South Africa is really reliant on the US, on USAID, on the bipartisan PEPFAR program to stand up infrastructure for its healthcare in the country.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
That's a country that has the highest percentage of HIV, AIDS positive people in the country than any other. And South Africa also depends on a trade relationship with the U.S., something called the African Growth and Opportunity Act that I was privileged to help renegotiate in the Obama administration. that gives South Africa access to U.S. markets in a beneficial way.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And as a result of that, they've been able to build and transport like 70,000 automobiles per year into the U.S. Companies like Volkswagen, BMW put plants in South Africa because they know that they can work through this trade relationship and contact with the U.S. It's benefited South African workers, but it's also benefited
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
benefited American consumers, but also American workers who are on this side of the supply chain. It's been good for both sides of the Atlantic.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
So it is bizarre that both on the healthcare front and on the trade front, the relationship is basically fractured over this mismaking on the oppression of white South African farmers who now have been granted this special dispensation and asylum that none of them are using because they don't have the problem that Donald Trump is describing. It's bonkers, Tim.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
That's a lengthy explanation, probably a little too lengthy here, but that's what's going on.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
He's not. But you know what? Donald Trump is following and he's a savant of this. Donald Trump. And this is an interesting thing. When we when we get into the conversation of the you know, what's going on with Republicans and Democrats, it's kind of important to note that Donald Trump is a savant of the media ecosystem that we existed. He understood that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
In this era, there's a way that you can take the subtext and make it the text. And so on right-wing, fringe social media and what we used to call the dark web, which is not just the web, there was loads of foment around this issue and what was happening with Afrikaners in South Africa, what had happened to white farmers in Zimbabwe. And all this stuff about how the changing population in the U.S.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
needed to be concerned about this, that farmers in Ohio and Iowa, et cetera, would start to see this kind of thing if we allowed for all the migrants to come into America to take the farm jobs, et cetera, and that they were going to replace white Americans in the heartland. This was like flourishing in the web.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
So in that run-up to 2016 election, this guy was really clever at pulling together all the strands of really dark conspiracy theories on the extreme right, platforming them, censoring them, and figuring out how to kind of do a wink and a nod to it all throughout that campaign. So that's a fever that he picked up then that persists to this day. But you ask about Elon Musk.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
There's an important element here for those of us who care about corruption, and a thing that we don't talk about here in the U.S., but that we talk about a lot in South Africa, the notion of state capture. Please understand that right as Donald Trump becomes president again, Elon Musk goes back to South Africa.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
He has a meeting with the president of South Africa, Sir Raul Posa, and he tries to push on South Africa a deal around Starlink. So here you have a person who is influencing
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Donald Trump's direction of travel and his foreign policy, of course, blowing up the government as we know it and blowing up our soft power footprint in USAID and basically punishing South Africa with the drawback that we have from PEPFAR, et cetera, at the same time that the same person who happens to be the richest person in the world is trying to convince the South African government that they should enter into a financial arrangement with him and his private enterprise, Starlink.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
All of this stuff gets braided together in ways that we need to do a better job of interrogating and challenging the way Congressman Stephen Horsford, for instance, challenged the U.S. trade rep around whether or not market manipulation was happening. We have to call this stuff out and name it for the American people to be able to recognize it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
I saw that your interview yesterday with Catherine was great and spot on and touched on all the things. And it is important for us to kind of reiterate now that we didn't kind of go back to the normal. And even though the markets rallied for a couple of hours yesterday, the drops are still historic and precipitous.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And economists on the left and right in the center are waking up right now to the reality that's going to take some time to recover from this crisis.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And that 10% thing is a misnomer because we still have 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, on auto, and huge tariffs on... generic pharmaceuticals from India that's going to be hugely problematic for everybody in this country, particularly our seniors are going to be hit in a really pernicious way as a result of this. So all that said, on the economic front, really important, Tim.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
But let's talk about that conversation that Steve Horsford had yesterday with the trade rep, as the trade rep is clearly finding out in real time that his boss has pulled the rug out from under him as he's like defending the indefensible. And Steve Horsford and many others say, well, what exactly is going on here?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Because we know that a few hours earlier in the day, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is going on a social media platform and telling people, signaling, wink nod, now is a really good time to like go and buy. You know, buy low because something may happen that could make the prices run in the other direction. Does it like suggest a hint at insider trading?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
It trumpets it like out loud, clearly what this person is saying. There's a psychology to markets and all this pricing is kind of like an emotional construct and that emotion is going up and down. And I'm capable of doing some things, as you well know. that can drive it in one direction or another.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And given that the president has a circle of internal advisors in the White House and external advisors who are overwhelmingly like billionaires who are involved in trading, who benefit directly from market fluctuations,
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Everything that we know about this president, everything we know about a president who brings his daughter on to be a special advisor in the first term, and then she gets this preferential deal in China for her handbags during that first term, and all the other things that we can name as obvious points of corruption, it is next to near impossible to imagine that somebody who's turning the faucet on and off about the market isn't
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
benefiting in some way directly from that manipulation and isn't indicating to his cohort, this is what I'm going to do 30 minutes from now or an hour from now, and therefore you ought to make a set of trades based on this. It is impossible to believe that of this president and those who are around him.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Yeah, I did catch that. I'm so happy that you kind of unpacked that so clearly for the audience. You said, Tim, that it may be impossible to prove this. I don't think it's impossible to prove it at all.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
No, no, no, no, no, but here's the thing. Here's the thing. This is the same administration that recklessly used a signal chat on a national security matter to declare war and then invited a reporter on it. You can trust that these folk have paper trails, they've got digital footprints that are a mile long on everything that they're doing because in addition to being corrupt,
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
They're also incompetent. And so this stuff will come out. And at some point after 2026, I am confident that Democrats are going to have the gavel back in their hands and in Congress. And that's going to compel a number of investigations around all of this stuff. So things are going to eventually, you know, truth crushed to the earth will rise again on Wi-Fi.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
So we're going to we're going to find out some things. The question is, how do we litigate it? How do we narrate it in a way that folks can be repulsed by it and act? accordingly. So it is a very, very real thing. And these are, you know, we're living in a moment of state capture, which I just didn't think that I'd ever be saying about the United States of America.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Tim, so I'd say this, the thing that is the most alarming to me is the thing that's also the most encouraging. Strange thing to say. But the level of state capture, how oligarchy is working in this moment, the fact that we have an
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
unelected individual who also happens to be the wealthiest person on earth, who also happens to have built his wealth along the spine of government investments from the Pentagon, from the Department of Energy, etc., That person is now determining budgetary outcomes for the very same departments that contract with him. It's astonishing.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And that individual gets to pick winners or losers in the EV sector that, again, he personally benefits from. The fact that this is happening in broad daylight, and the fact that this individual, Elon Musk, is allowed to just kind of hold forth in cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office in a way that
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Again, it's not pushed into, it's not interrogated from mainstream Republican leadership is, I think, the most astonishing and the most shocking thing to me. I mean, the very first time that Donald Trump calls Zelensky in the Ukraine after he's elected Elon Musk is in that conversation. He's part of that meeting.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Elon Musk, who provides Starlink resources to the Ukraine military, is making governing calls about this stuff. So the extent of state capture and the kind of naked transparency of it and the fact that it is not being...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
interrogated, questioned in any way whatsoever from institutional Republicans, for me, is the most frightening, shocking thing that I worry has now become a new normal that doesn't get rolled back easily at all, irrespective of who's in office.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
But why I say that's the most encouraging thing, you know, through our C4 at the Center for American Progress, we've just done tons of polling and lots of research on this. And it's been extraordinary to see for people like me who've always tried to raise the questions about big money in politics and who've got no traction on it.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
It's been astonishing to see the reaction that we're seeing from average Americans, not just from Democrats, but self-identified Republicans as well, who are saying that they are concerned. about corruption in government. They are concerned about who's actually in control and running things. Elon Musk is underwater across the board in a way that says there's real salience to these issues.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And that I think really matters. There is a consciousness that's being developed for the American people about this issue. And I think we all got to figure out as political actors, the language that we need in order to like create real campaigns and more momentum to push back against this stuff. It's rapacious.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Oh, man, Tim, you know, I know you're sympathetic and you're empathetic about this. And it was extraordinarily painful to watch, you know, good people in Springfield, Ohio, who were being caricatured in the most ugly way by J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and so many others.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Hardworking folk who went to Springfield precisely because there's been a 20 percent drop in the population there last 15 years. And there were jobs that were going wanting. And the Republican governor invited them into the state to kind of do their part for the community. And they revitalized these communities. And to see them attack that way was extraordinary. So yes, my parents are from Haiti.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
I was born in the Congo because of My father is somebody who stood up for the notion of democracy and free and fair elections in Haiti at a time when, you know, the Givayer regime was in, at a time when the U.S. was not making good on its rhetoric of protecting democracy, but was actually supporting the dictatorship there.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And my father and hundreds of other Haitians intellectuals had to leave the country because their lives were at risk because they were fighting for democracy. I ended up teaching in the Congo. I was born in the Congo. We eventually immigrated to the U.S. I feel very strongly about that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
This being a space that is inviting that America's prosperity grows because of that invitation to the most enterprising people on the planet, the hardest working people on the planet who come here to make a way when there is no way. And Republicans and Democrats alike have always leaned into that ethos and that story of America. So it is astonishing to see green card holders
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
who are coming back into the U.S. from work overseas and they're being strip searched at our airports. It's astonishing to see young people who dare to use their voices in the First Amendment spirit of the U.S. being stopped in the streets and, you know, taken into custody and deported as a consequence, even though they've broken no law in the nation. These are shocking things to see.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And even when Joe Rogan is coming out and saying, wait a second, there's something cruel and unusual and perverse about taking someone who you know is no gang member and hasn't violated the law and is here under legal protections and the asylum system, and you're shipping them off to El Salvador. Even Joe Rogan is saying something is wrong. with these folks.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Why were they given protected status, Tim? Because they were either fleeing a life-changing, cataclysmic earthquake that killed 300,000 Haitians in one shell swoop, or... they were fleeing political violence in Haiti, and they were able to prove that and determine that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
But I raised the Haiti thing for a reason, not just because I'm Haitian, but throughout Latin America. Here's the challenge. Right now, there is a mafia state in Haiti where gangs have basically taken over every aspect of governance in the country, and 90% of the weapons that are on the streets in Haiti that are threatening citizens, come from the United States, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
So here we are, like taking protective status from a group of people who are vulnerable precisely because of the gun industry in America and the way we kind of look the other way in our parts as a river of death flows from the US, from Florida in particular, straight into Haiti, into the hands of gang members. But we absolve ourselves of that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And instead we send people who are here under legal protection back into a conflict zone that we have helped to create and exacerbate the conditions for. It's just what's real.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Oh, my God. Now it's time. I remember that job.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Let's start with Governor Whitmer, and then let's go back out to your much bigger question, which I think would be the much more important one. So, on Gretchen Whitmer, if you live in Michigan, you want your governor... to be in direct conversation with the president of the United States. That is always a good thing. That is a necessary thing. We begin there.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Let's recognize, though, that one of the reasons why Governor Whitmer, who I just, I freaking love Governor Whitmer, the reason why she was challenged by many wasn't just because of the meeting.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
But the speech that preceded the meeting, she gave an address where she talked about where we're at right now, and she was seen to be insufficiently critical of Donald Trump and the tariffs and all the stuff that you just delineated before in her address. So that's a part of this where people were like, wait a second, is she kind of acquiescing to a thing here? That's part of the challenge.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
At the end of the day, even though you want your governor to be in conversation with the president, you want to have clarity on- who your governor is fighting for and what your governor is trying to solve for. And I think that wasn't altogether clear in the engagement that the governor had. And I'm going to be clear with you, Tim, like I'm a huge fan of the governor.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
I had an opportunity during the last democratic convention to introduce her at this forum around the care economy. And she has been just a, just a bulwark on that issue and on new industrial policy and fighting for democracy and a woman's right to bow your tummy, all the things. So huge fan of the governors.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
And she is one of the best narrators of the challenges and the opportunities that we have in the party. But that being said, she was caught in an awkward spot. And I think that she was caught in an awkward spot because there wasn't clarity on goal, mission, and what you're fighting for. And we need that clarity always. Now,
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
So I'm going to thread that a little differently, Tim, right? So there's no doubt that I have always been a kind of a partisan warrior. And I'm somebody who thinks, like Mike Tyson, that you have to get the first punch off and that changes everything inside of the ring. So I would agree with you on that. And I don't think that there's this binary thing between...
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
you know, being the party that lays out an art store for the future versus like fighting the proximate fight that we have in front of us right now. You need to be able to do everything everywhere all at once. You have to do everything except for play pasta, never play pasta that you can't do. Okay. But, Let me just say something in defense of government policy. You know what, Tim?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
There's nothing wrong with us being caught listening for once. We haven't been caught listening. That was a big problem. We weren't caught listening on immigration. We weren't caught listening on cost of living. We weren't caught listening on a number of issues that people care profoundly about. We weren't caught listening on the housing crisis.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
the middle class family have been faced with for many, many years now. So being caught listening is a good thing, but you kind of have to mobilize the lessons in a hurry. Like, all right, so what is it that we're hearing in real time? And who are the villains here in the story? And what are we doing to push back effectively against them?
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
So I do think that this is a moment for not to just be oppositional, but to be definitional about where we're trying to take the country forward. Is that right, though? Let me just challenge that for a second.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Mitch McConnell got lucky because let's be honest. Mitch McConnell said, we're going to do everything we can to make this guy fail. And they failed to do that. Last time I checked, Barack Obama got reelected. even though unemployment was near double digits at the time.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
So, Mitch McConnell's enterprise was a failed enterprise, and then Republicans lucked up after that in 2016, where this savant who has this kind of negative charisma and a gift for the moment, like, comes in. And let's never forget, Tim, that before Donald Trump uh, subdues Hillary Clinton and democratic party. He had the first bring to heel institutional Republicans, never forget that.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
So this, this moment is not a Mitch McConnell victory or a victory for all these folks who all have been kind of had to suck it up, uh, for the extreme wing of their party.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
I disagree. So I'm going to disagree with you. I'm going to totally disagree. I'm going to invite you to do a thing. Go back and watch Donald Trump's speeches in that 2016 campaign, 2015, 2016, and to that whole run. I lived them, man. I know. But if you watch that stuff and listen to him carefully, what did that guy always do? He conducted focus groups in real time. He'd come out there.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
That's true. And he would throw six things out to his audiences. And sometimes some of those things would get booed. And he would never bring them up again. He would listen to the things that people rally towards.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
He was always a foe.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
That's like the one I'm saying. I'm agreeing with you on that front. But I am saying that this is also, as for Klein's point, it is also a definitional moment. And you can't beat something with nothing. And I would take us back to what my friend, the senator from New Jersey, did.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
A couple of days ago, that kind of seized the public political imagination, but Senator Booker stood up there for 25 hours, and he gave us a kind of moral language for the moment that we're in, and he ran down all that shit that is, you know... coming downstream from the sewer of Donald Trump.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
But he also kind of owned up to a number of failings and said, we didn't do our part in this way, in this way, in this way. He kind of elucidated that and said, we've got to do better on these fronts. And he kind of pushed up some North stores on the values front and on the policy front and on substance, while also being really clear about who the bad guys and gals are in this moment.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
You can do both things at once. And we got to be caught both listening, but moving into a kind of pugilistic mode on this stuff quicker, faster now.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Well, housing we didn't even talk about, right? It wasn't until Kamala Harris becomes the nominee and then around the Democratic Convention, you know, a plan is thrown up. that doesn't really have an opportunity to bleed through because we weren't driving it successfully, but a plan is still not there.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
In all the polling that we were conducting in Center for American Progress, we kept seeing that the stubborn metric in people's experiences about the economy was housing, housing, housing, whether they were rural, suburban, or urban Americans, whether they were home buyers or aspiring to buy a home or aspiring to just be able to rent reasonably in a market.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
Housing was the thing that they were concerned about overwhelmingly. And we weren't talking about it. We didn't have a plan for it. Imagine for a second, Tim, that the infrastructure plan that we passed had been a housing infrastructure plan.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
How might Americans that viewed us differently in that moment, how might they have said, oh, they hear it, they see it, and they are responding in a way that I can vote for and I can rally for. We were not caught listening on that and speaking to it.
The Bulwark Podcast
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Uh, and then on immigration, you know, I think that a lot of my friends on this issue thought that we had a messaging problem and didn't recognize that we had a policy problem actually. And we should have been saying much earlier and a, and a much more robust way that the asylum system wasn't be broken. And that, um,
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Not only did we need more resources at the border, but an entirely different approach on the question of asylum. And I think we waited way too long to address that. We kept saying there was no crisis at the border.
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And that's not what people were experiencing far away from the border, even in blue cities, where folks were feeling a downward pressure on public goods, more people waiting in the hospital emergency room, more kids in my kids' classroom. What's going on here now? And why isn't anyone talking about it at
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addressing it at a time when we're feeling economically squeezed, but it feels as if we're allowing other people to jump the queue and get work rights and permissions. So we were narrating it badly, but we had a bad set of policies there. And there's got to be a way for the broad center left tent to
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to take up a really different approach on immigration that, yes, speaks to our values and speaks to our history of what it means to be able to grow our prosperity in our country and improve our economic outcomes as a consequence of the parole every year we get from immigration, but speaks to the real consequences of having a broken, fractured asylum system. And we just didn't do that well.
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And we had the challenge of incumbency, Tim.
The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption
What do you think about that discourse about the groups? Here's what I think about that discourse. Here's what I think. And Tim, you understand, of course, that I've been not only part of the groups, but I was once the president of the Open Society Foundation. So I helped to fund the groups, right? Strategically. But here's the thing. I'm also somebody who's working politics.
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I've worked on local city council elections. I've worked on gubernatorial elections, congressional elections. I've worked on presidential elections. And guess what I learned about politicians, Jim? They don't listen to the groups. You know what they listen to? Listen to polling. Overwhelmingly, politicians listen to polling.
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I don't know a single politician who's ever taken a significant issue into their boat that hasn't been over-polled and over-focused groups.
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Well, but Tim, you know, primary audiences are polled as well. And if a group is asking you to fill out a form that you think puts you at cross purposes with your primary audience that you've polled, you're not going to fill out the thing. You just won't. You just don't do it. But if you're reading polling that says, you know what?
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There's a constituency for this, and that constituency is animated around this in ways that could be to my benefit or to my detriment as a political actor. But yeah, I may check the box in this thing. So let's not make a distinction between the blob of the groups and the instinct that politicians have around survival, around their own success. That's heavy.
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overwhelmingly driven by polling and the information they get from their consultants on these things. That's the first thing that I will say to you. We also had these moments where the Overton window gets blown open in a particular way as it did on criminal justice reform, for instance, in America following George Floyd and politicians and other civil society actors and the media itself.
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then make a set of decisions about what they are going to invest in, cover, lift up based on that Overton window. That Overton window can blow shut in a hurry on you. And in American history, there's always the backlash to the backlash. And some politicians are nimble enough to be out in front of that and others aren't.
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And given how little power and little authority the groups actually have in America and how most of them are like, under budgeted, they can barely like hold their staff together.
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Uh, I am, I am challenged to accept a story, this overly simplified story that these powerful political actors who are usually dismissive of groups where they're in meetings with them, et cetera, or somehow like just completely surrendering their political fates to the groups. And that's why they're in the pickle that they're in.
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Tim, the single most important election that's happened in America in the last 30 years outside of a presidential election was the 2014 midterm loss of Eric Cantor, who was the majority leader in the House, who was to the right of Attila the Hun, last I checked. But he was defeated. He was defeated by someone who was to the right of him, who had significantly less resources than he had.
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And it was because of the attacks from right-wing groups. Right-wing group.
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But let's be clear that Eric Cantor, and this is the punchline here, Eric Cantor was using his resources to move in the direction of of the group view, because that was the direction of the primary audience that he had in his state. That's the punchline there. It's the important thing.
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That election is important because it conditioned a particular kind of behavior amongst institutional Republicans who then surrendered to the Frankenstein monster that they had built in their basement and let loose in the world. That's what leads to the Trump moment, et cetera, et cetera. But let's not forget that Eric Cantor was actually moving in the direction of his primary audience.
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And where the groups were just not quickly and nimbly enough.
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The politicians move to the extremes if they feel that that's where their bases are. The groups are important in creating accountability and a sense of civil society in our country that we can't lose sight of, even though you are right to have a critique about how strategic they are and whether or not there are some extremes there. Your critique, I take as right, but I'm a Thomas Paine guy.
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So I'm always going to believe in the need and the necessity of civil society organism that can build accountability and that can, in a way, help to localize our national politics.
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First thing we got to do is lose the mythology of what the workforce actually looks like and what the growing parts of the economy are. When you talk about working class Black and brown folk, they are overwhelmingly people who are in the service economy, people who are in spaces like healthcare, which is the fastest growing part of our economy in cities and states around this country.
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And being able to speak directly and pointedly about those types of jobs instead of constantly mythologizing hard hat jobs as a working class job, which are, you know, very few and far between, and that's not the going parts of the economy.
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Got to recognize that, you know, the folks who are working in Amazon warehouses for us, for instance, those are not hard hat jobs in the way that they are like taken up in the popular political narrative. Those are part of the service economy. That's not becoming the information economy. Got to recognize that and speak to that and got to speak directly to
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We spend a lot of time right now talking about cost of living. We actually don't spend any time at all talking about the bottoming out of wages in America. I don't want you to talk about the price of eggs. I want you to help figure out how I'm going to have dignity in the workplace that's going to enable me to earn enough to buy a home. Or to create community.
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So we're actually not talking about the shocking income disparities, the downward pressure on wages, the fact that wages have not grown really in any meaningful way in the last 25 years in our country, and figuring out how
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We are pushing into this notion of collective organizing, collective bargaining that's working out for not just union members, but non-union workers in the service economy is a thing that is lacking in our politics that we have to find simple and organic ways to introduce to our political platform work.