Jonathan Chait: The World's Worst People

Welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A couple of things really quick. We have sold out the event in Dallas, March 18th. On March 19th, we're in Austin. It is the biggest venue we've ever had an event at. We're going to have a fun guest. Who needs a guest, actually? I'm going to be there. Sarah's going to be there, JVL. It's South by Southwest that week. So make a little trip out of it. You know, make a little spring trip. If you live somewhere cold going down to Austin, Thursday, South by Southwest, Friday, never Trump podcast, Saturday, go to La Barbecue, Rainy Street. You know, do something. Come on down to Austin. Tickets at the bulwark.com slash events. Next, I have heard from you. Tim Robinson is wearing a hot dog suit, not a banana suit. We regret the air. Okay, I get it. All right. I'm talking a lot. I'm doing my best. It was kind of the same shape. In my brain, it's the same shape. Cucumber soup? It's hot dog said. It's not a cucumber suit. Lastly, I told you we're going to have a new guest today. That was wrong. We had a scheduling snafu. So instead, despite that noise that you just heard of somebody interrupting, I've decided to do a one-hour monologue today on ethics and decorum in hockey locker room behavior. So prepare for that. Then we're going to get into Erika Kirk. We're going to do an hour on Eric and Kirk's connection to Global Joy. Now, instead, a friend of the show. who came in off the bench. We appreciate very much. Staff writer at the Atlantic. It's Jonathan Chait. How are you doing? Thank you. I'm gunning for sixth man of the year in the Bullwark podcast. Tim Hardaway, Jr. People have strong thoughts about hockey. We're not going to talk about that. I want to start here. Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? Any thoughts on that? Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? If you're trying to get me to confess, I'm not going to do it unless you put me in the stand. Until we find out who killed Jeffrey Epstein, we're going to keep talking about him on this podcast. Two things that are worth mentioning. I'm going to get into some of the news of the day. Hillary Clinton is back in the news. She is testifying in a closed-door interview, which will be videotaped in Chappaqua. James Comer, James Comer. Very serious. Really, he's just, he's like OJ. He's out there searching for the real, real killer here, the real rapist. He's found Hillary. He's going to interview her about the Epstein situation. Simultaneously, more seriously to that, if you want to check out the board, take speed, I was talking to Roger Solenberger. There is a cover-up happening. We don't know the veracity of the underlying information, but there was a... She was a woman when she made the report. She was a girl when the alleged event happened. She went to the FBI, said that Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump had assaulted her when she was underage. There were four FBI interviews. One of them was in the Epstein files. The other three are not notably. And I talked to Roger about that. You can listen to that interview on Bullard takes. So any thoughts on the latest in the Epstein saga? I mean, they were never going to release.

information that cast Donald Trump in a negative light, right? What they were going to do was to release information that they had that was exculpatory or at least unrelated to Donald Trump that they could spin. But the endgame of this was always some kind of cover up. We don't know how true these allegations are because these are their leads, their tips. It's a file. It's not, it's not criminal. criminal proof. But, you know, I always thought this was where it was going to go, was that they would find whatever was bad about Donald Trump had not released that to the public. That's what they're going to do. The interesting thing with the Epstein, though, and it's just the classic cover-up part of it is, I think... a big part of the Trump vulnerability here. Like, this is a traditional politician scandal in some ways and various things weird tabloid circumstances. It's like, you know, the cover up is what is happening. Right. And even within the Trump coalition, like. There's basic consensus that, like, Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are clowns, right? Like, I mean, you have, like, the people on Fox or whatever who are just regime propagandists, they will not say anything. But anywhere in the kind of the mega opinion space, you know, ranging from Megyn Kelly to the manosphere, there's essentially unanimity here that these folks are clowns. that they're covering something up. And in that sense, I do think this is not not a real political vulnerability for him as the year of press is forward. It is. I mean, it's sort of zooming out to a higher level. This was their issue, right? This was the rights issue. The Democrats can start talking about Epstein. The Republicans did. But what's amazing is that because Donald Trump is so singularly devoid of virtue is bad in almost every way a human being can be bad. He's also implicated in this. Their hand-picked issue, the thing they chose to talk about seems to implicate Donald Trump more than any other politician, which is kind of amazing, right? It's as if, you know, like, you know, like Richard Nixon turns out to have been friends with Alger Hiss. Right. Right. Like this is his thing. This was their issue. But like he. There's just almost no issue you can pick where Donald Trump is a good guy. So it turns out this is just like another way in which Donald Trump is bad because he's bad in all the way. I lied. I will say one more thing about the hockey team. Okay. This is why he wants to talk about the fucking hockey team. Yeah. The record is in tatters. And even on these core issues where you would have thought that the base would have been on his side, whether it be Epstein or immigration, right? Like the things that like their media universe cared about.

The Epstein thing is a total catastrophe for him. And on immigration, it's flipped. He's underwater. I mean, Abigail Spanberger talked more about ice and CBP than heat it. But the hockey thing is also a problem for him because his FBI director just took a trip to Europe to watch hockey on the taxpayer dime. And he's trying to- Without arresting anyone. Has he arrested anyone? Who have they got? Right, right. It's a big sting operation. We're going to find out later. No, and he's claiming he was just there for meetings. And while he's there, the hockey game just happened to be going on, except they found a tweet from him last summer. congratulating the hockey team and saying, I will be there. Last summer, I'll be there. You saw this, right? Kash Patel tweeted, I will be there to watch you guys in the Olympics. So now they're claiming it's just a coincidence that he was there when he was clearly planning it for more than a year. No more hockey. Joe Sack. Unless we're talking about Joe Sack, a computer forest park. Right. Again, it's like all the stories are bad for him, right? It's like he's pivoting to hockey. But like in a normal world, hockey would be the last thing you would want to talk about because his FBI director would be like on the verge of being fired. All the stories are bad for him. To that point, I loved this. My friend Laxha Jane who's a pollster and wrote this up for the argument. There's like they have a longitudinal way to like verify. the people that they're polling what they had said before, right? Like they're following the same people along. And so you can match to see who they had said that they had voted for in 2024 to give you a baseline when you're getting information about them now. You know, so it's telling. And one thing that they, it seems like they stumbled on that this was not intentional that ended up just writing this article about this was that about. 15% of Trump 2024 voters disapproved of his job performance. Yeah. That's a standard thing to poll. The interesting thing is among that group, among that 15%, about one and four did not admit to having voted for him when they asked again. 13% even falsely going to have voted for Kamala Harris. So maybe amnesia is happening. But I think that is about as telling as you can get as far as his political problems and the scope of his political problems that were like not even to the midterm. We're a year and a month in to the presidency. And, you know, I mean, we're doing quick math here. What's a quarter of 15%? About 4%. So not a huge. But about 4% of the people that voted for him, don't just disapprove of us. It's like Peter in the Garden. Who is Donald Trump? What are you talking about? I've never supported that, man. Yeah, but what makes it so amazing is that traditionally the amnesia goes the other way. People falsely remember having voted for the winner. This is a well-established fact in polling. So it's not the level 4% is low, but it's the direction that's so surprising. People usually...

claim to have voted for the winner and not have to have voted for the loser. So I'm not sure like that's ever happened before. I want to go through a couple other news items and get to some of your recent columns. So we may be going to war with Iran. Yeah. There was a story in Politico this morning that is like, I just mind boggling. It's a brain fuck for me because I can't decide whether the Trump advisors that are the sources for this story are the stupidest political advisors in recent memory to work at the White House or if it's like a savvy attempt. to sabotage the plans inside the whiteouts. It could be either. Here's the story. Senior advisors to President Trump told Politico they would prefer Israel strike Iran first in the hopes that Iran would retaliate against America or American assets in the Middle East, which would then help muster support for American voters. for a full-scale war in Iran. That was two White House sources to Politico. Yeah, do you remember before the Iraq or during the Iraq War, sorry, the Gulf War in 1990, the first Iraq War, going all the way back, this is, this is, you were pretty young man, but I don't remember that. Saddam Hussein launched missiles at Israel, hoping to draw Israel into the war so he could rally Arab states to his side after he had invaded Kuwait. So we're sort of trying the Saddam strategy here. Oh, so we're in the role of Saddam. Well, I mean, we've got the two. We've got Uday and Kusei already, you know, doing deals. The design aesthetic is very Uday and Kusei as well. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there have been some other examples. There's plenty over his, in history, you know, Gulf of Tonkin or whatever. But, you know, remember the main. A lot of times though, that was a post hoc thing. You know, like this happened and then we're using it as a rationale. Right. I can't tell if it's a hope or wishcasting or baiting. Even if this went out, as they said. The advisors think that us getting drug into a Middle East war by Israel is going to make it more popular. I truly don't understand. I've been talking about this for like a week now and I'm asking every guess. I'm just grasping. I don't understand what they're doing. I don't understand why he's doing it. All of the logical things people say like, oh, it's going to distract from Epstein or oh. Like machismo or maybe there's a corrupt deal. I don't know. Jared wants to build something in Tehran. Like none of it makes sense. Right. What is the actual motive? Right? Because the, on the surface motives are so.

comically transparent, right? They claimed to have destroyed the Iranian nuclear program. They claimed, in fact, that anyone who said that it wasn't completely destroyed forever was a fake news, you know, liar. Right. So now we've got to redestroy the Iranian nuclear program that we'd already permanently destroyed. So we know that they're lying, but what is the actual reason? It's really hard to say other than, you know, So there's post-Venezuela, and then Trump deciding he's not, he's never going to win a Nobel Peace Prize, so he might as well go for the war prizes. So he's high on his own supply off Venezuela, and it's just like, I can just do this now. I can just put in new friendly dictators everywhere. Right. Like I've got a new, I've got a new tool. Like, I've got a new thing I could do. I could do it without Congress, right? So like, you know, tariffs were won. Like, let's just see what I can do with my new toy. You mentioned the nuclear program logic. And, uh, I saw this bopping around social media, and it tickled me. So I'm going to play it. You know, the rationale for war, the stated one, could have a nuclear weapon any minute. Here's some clips of BB talking about the Iranian nuclear program between the dates of summer 1995 and this week. If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. It could be a year. It could be within a few months. They have the wherewithal, the stored up preserved knowledge to make a bomb very quickly if they wanted to do it. Iran is so dangerous. Weeks away from having the Fissal material. for an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs. They're very close. They're six months away from being about 90% of having the rich uranium for an atom bomb. Iran is gearing up to have to produce 25 bombs, atomic bombs a year, 250 bombs in a decade. Ladies and gentlemen, time is running out. Iran will be capable of producing alone, without importing anything, nuclear bombs within three to five years. For 31 years, they've been a few weeks away. And in this case, they're a few weeks away after we obliterated it. It's hard to take that. I don't think that's going to land with people. I don't know. What about you, Jonathan? Trump clearly believes that people don't like long wars, but I think he seems to have been persuaded that he can engage in some kind of, you know, short one-off conflicts. And as long as there are no, you know, troops on the ground, there's no long. commitment, it won't cost him any popularity. The question is whether he can actually do something like that in Iran that's consistent with those parameters. The Wall Street Journal had a really interesting story about this last week. What they said was, you know, again, I don't know if these are leaks from people who are against it and trying to stop it, or if these are actual leaks from people who are... for it. But what this was, he's decided on the tactic, but he hasn't decided on the objective. Oh. The tactic is he's going to bomb Iran. He doesn't know if he wants to do it to stop the nuclear program, to stop the ballistic missile program, or to topple the regime altogether. And I've never heard of someone starting a war without knowing what their objective is first.

Usually the tactic follows from the objective. Here's what we want to accomplish. How do we accomplish that? Now, here's what we want to do. What do we think will happen as a result of this? We've got to figure that out. It seems so unbelievably haphazard and stupid. And if you think behind the scenes, there's actually some mastermind who's got some clever plan that probably is it. Can I share with you a wrong thought, even though this is public podcast? I mean, Is it bad for me to root for the lose-lose situation here? I don't like the Ayatollah. I don't know. Donald Trump, you know, getting himself into Iran-Quagmire does seem to be good for me, as I think that both the Ayatollah and Donald Trump would find themselves politically harmed by that. Is that wrong? My skepticism about regime change is practical. It's not moral. Right. So if you told me that we could actually pull off regime change, get the Islamic Republic out. and put in some kind of democratic regime in Iran, I'd be all for it. I'm just, you know, I'm skeptical that we can pull it off. But I would love that to happen. I do, you know, think that, like, it would be nice if we could, you know, replace all the dictators in the world with democracies. I don't think it's easy to do. And I don't think we should try. But sure, if it worked, that would be great. Just to be clear, Jonathan Chait, against regime change. Not against set change, though. We had to move because we had some construction happening outside his house. So you're not going crazy. You know, if you're eating your weed gummies, watching this on YouTube. He has changed locations. But the podcast continues. I want to talk about a couple of your recent pieces, including a couple of them about corruption and Trump administration. We've talked a lot about the crypto, so I'll get to that. There is this other story but the Canada Bridge. And I believe I mentioned it on the podcast kind of in the context of Trump's stupid bleat about how if Canada and China work too closely together, I'm going to cancel this bridge and we're going to ban hockey. Here we are mentioning hockey again. But the story ended up being even more corrupt than just like what we saw in its face. So why don't you talk about that a little bit? So. Michigan has a bridge to Canada. It's a key crossing point. For decades, it's been privately owned by the Maroon family, and they've done everything they could to prevent competing bridges for being built so that they can collect these absorbent tools. It's a huge economic source spot for both... Michigan and Canada because it's a key crossing point. And it backs up. It's the only way for trucks to get across. And so they've just spent millions of dollars basically paying off politicians and just preventing any public bridge. But finally, there was a workaround. Love capitalism. Love capitalism. Exactly. There was a workaround actually under Rick Snyder, the Republican former governor of Michigan.

One tough nerd. One tough nerd. And this was the best thing he ever did. Canada built the entire bridge. That was the way they got around the Michigan legislature all being applied by these donations from this monopolist. Canada paid all the costs of building the bridge, and they are going to recoup their building costs by collecting the tolls until they've repaid the money they put it, after which point the tolls will be split. But in the meantime, the benefits of this new bridge and the faster passage time for trucks will be shared by everybody. So this is a giant boon for the economy in Michigan that's set to open. imminently. And the Maroon family is panicked because they're losing their monopoly. They won't have the only bridge. They won't be able to charge as much for people to go over their, you know, overpriced super long. Yeah. So like their whole business model is stopping competition. So what they did was they. They basically met with Trump. They gave a million dollar donation to one of his MAGA packs. And then Trump came up with this story about how the Canadians are ripping us off or whatever. And he's going to block the bridge. So that's where it is right now. So he's basically shutting it down. And, you know, I don't know what his. His cover stories about hockey or China or, you know, hating Canada or whatever it is. And maybe Maroon, you know, pressed some of these emotional. Yeah, maybe emotional, these emotional buttons were pressed, you know, in this beating. But there's all just a just a pure monopolist play to keep the bridge monopoly going. Like the degree to which that this administration is acting like. a third world island republic run by, you know, like the one industrialist in the country or by a celebrity who is backed by the one industrialist in the country. It's remarkable. You know, and there's this type of... you know, crony capitalism happening all the time. But, like, just the shamelessness of it, the brazenness of it, the scale. This guy's just giving straight money into the pack. Somebody told me a story recently that the Trump line lobbyists, like Brian Ballard out of Florida, are literally going to people like the Maroons and saying, hey, we can solve this problem for you. You've got to pay us our fee, which is exorbitant. But then on top of that, you've got to throw in. 5, 10, 20 million into the Republican Senate campaign, congressional campaign PAC, Trump's personal PACs, like the type of behavior that was just totally unthinkable, you know, even in the swampy, corrupt, you know, whatever, Clinton, Bush, Obama years. And it just makes me think that like,

Trump, during the State of the Union, made this line about the Somalians. I don't have it right in front of me. For memory, it was basically they are importing their bribery and corruption and lawlessness to our country. And it's like, Trump is running a Somalian government. Like if it's defined such as that, right? And it's bribery, corruption, and lawlessness. Like, those are the defining characteristic traits of the government. And there's no... conservative defense of any of this behavior of which I'm aware other than sometimes they point to other things, which is, you know, the what aboutism. And that's what I think part of the Somalian thing is there's, they're activating racism, but it's also kind of what aboutism, but their own corruption. I think all the insiders in the Republican Party are aware of the staggering levels of corruption that have been undertaken by this administration. And I just don't think they have any, any, defense at all i was thinking about this going back even to like the tax bill you know like even the more traditional things that trump has done you haven't had in this second trump administration like what we who have been around washington have traditionally seen right you know like Obama has a plan for the ACA. There is a bunch of think tanks behind it doing white papers. There's a bunch of bloggers, you know, your eyes reclines and et cetera who are supporting this, a bunch of media, you know, commentators who are making the case for it on the merits. Trump doesn't have that. I was one of them. Yeah, sure. There you go. Sorry to snub you. Jonathan Chates, the Madaglaces says reclines. Jonathan Cohn. Yeah, Jonathan Cohn here at the bulwark. You don't have that for basically anything that Trump is doing, actually, except for immigration. You know, Heritage has like some fake Potemkin support for some of this stuff. But like there isn't like a big substantive apparatus behind all this. It's basically just like Trump gets to do what he wants. And like we'll talk about we want and just support him. It's cultish. Yeah. No, I mean, there are traditional conservative policy goals that have been advanced. And that tax bill was. was the main example of it. But who was, like, the biggest ad, like, you know, you had Grover Norquist that came out of the, you know, Bush and Tea Party era. Like, who was the big advocate for the tax bill? It was like, we really need to run up some deficits more. And, like, it's critical right now that we decrease the top rate even a little further. Like, who were the big, like, banning? I could think of the big, like, opponents of it in the mega media. I think if you polled. members of Congress, professional Republicans, people who were Republicans before Trump, they would say that was their favorite moment of the Trump administration. That was the top thing he did. Like, they really believe in that as policy. The border. They'd say the border, I think.

Republicans in Congress. I think they care about the border, but I think they care about the taxes more. I didn't sense a ton of enthusiasm for the big, beautiful bill. Really? No. Oh, I think they were. I mean, I think there's a kind of deal between the traditional Republicans who have stayed in the party, that is most of them, under Trump, they're getting a payoff from it. And their payoff is the advancement of their traditional priorities. They would rather have, you know, slightly lower taxes in an authoritarian right-wing government than higher taxes and a democracy. This is now we're into a psychological exercise. Yeah. And so it's not really knowable, I guess, unless we gave truth serum to John Thune. I don't know. Who is your representative person for this? Sure. John Thune's a perfect example. I think he was enthusiastic about this. Yeah. I mean, I think he was actually, like, really excited about it. I think it's lib hating that motivates them. I think it's Team Jersey lib hating and media hating. I mean, I don't think that they were like opposed to the tax bill. I just. There wasn't a ton of enthusiasm for it. So why did he do it? I mean, it was unpopular. They spent political capital to get this done. Yeah, right. So inertia. I mean, they had to do something via reconciliation. I Donald Trump did everything else via fiat. They had to do something via reconciliation. And they're like, well, we got to do something. We're Republicans. What should we do? I guess we'll do a massive. deficit spending tax cut i think there's more excitement for doge actually they didn't work i loved that story i loved that story about the wallster the our buddy alan cole who bet against doge working he bet on calci i don't support betting on calci but he's a pretty bet on calci that the government would spend more in 2025 than they did in 2024 after doge right he won like a hundred thousand dollars on the bet good on him yeah so i don't know i think they're more excited about doge Just really quick, while in the corruption space, you also wrote about the crypto story. Like, what stands out to you the most? Is it the geopolitical side of the corruption or just the scale of how much money they're making? Yeah, they really opened a trapdoor into just direct payments to the president's family, right? Like in the first term, they could collect hotel bookings and some licensing. Which wasn't nothing. Right. They were charging a lot for their hotel bookings. But they've like a thousand X to the... scale of the payments they're able to collect through crypto. Yeah. Which is also, you know, it's the main use of crypto as opposed to normal currencies is just for criminals. So it's just another way in which they're just tied into scammers, criminals, you know, the world's worst people, just all the most natural Trumpian constituencies all come together. It's almost overdetermined that they would be heavy into crypto. Relating this to our favorite topic of. You know, how Republicans don't actually believe at all what they say. And this is all just like kind of team sports negative partisanship all the way down. But like the China element of this, literally they would talk about nothing else for a generation on Fox. If a Democratic president pardoned.

A Chinese national criminal who then proceeded to put a quarter of a billion or a half a billion dollars into the president's family's pocket. The president's family's business, at least. Right. And then as a result of that, the Chinese end up getting access to American-made AI chips. Right. That's sort of like a geopolitical deal related to the payoff to the president. that was also related to the pardoning of the Chinese national. It's insane. Like the Hunter Biden's paintings or whatever. I mean, it's like, think about the stuff that on Fox. I thought there's some legitimate critiques of the Clinton Global Initiative payoffs while Hillary was still in Secretary of State. But that wasn't even going into their pocket. I was going to a charity. To a charity. And here, like, we have money going straight to the Trumps. There was a Gore fundraising scandal from the second Clinton term, and maybe you're a little too young to remember this, but like the Buddhist monks and he was raising monies, but they had some connection to the Chinese government. It was a gigantic scandal. But it wasn't going into his pocket, and he wasn't pardoning criminals. I mean, it was like, you know, 1% as bad as this. But that was on front pages for months and months. We took a poll of Brett Baer's viewers. and said, are you aware that Donald Trump parted into Chinese national, then went into business with him and made hundreds of millions of dollars? And that same business did a deal that resulted in the Chinese getting AI chips that they didn't have access to. Like what percentage of Brett Baer's audience do you think knows that that happened? I would think less than 10%. I would think. Agreed. Great work, Brett. You're just knocking it out of the park over there. Speaking of Fox, you wrote a kind of an interesting column with some, maybe a counterfactual, you might say, a different timeline where you put me into a different role. You did not ask me for my permission or approval about this. Tim Miller fan fiction. It's a great genre. Yeah, you did some Tim Miller fan fiction. Explain that story and the context and kind of how it relates to Fox and what we're seeing at CBS. I've been very critical. I've written some critical stories about Bari Weiss's tenure at CBS. And the context that you simply can't ignore is the obvious ones. And I'm sure your audience is well aware of it, right? Is that there was a merger involving Paramount. And the payoff to this merger approval is essentially Bari Weiss being put in charge of CBS in changing its ideological character. So. All the people who are trying to defend her tenure there are just focusing on the discrete steps of like, hey, maybe this story she held up needed more approval, or maybe this person she pushed out wasn't that great. Or maybe this person she wants to put into the job has some good ideas. None of those things. One script that Tony Ducopal rad was, yeah. The individual decisions aren't the point. The point is the corrupt circumstances under which she is there as part of a payoff to the president. That is the story. So I just imagined, you know, as a kind of...

counterfactual that you have a O.C. as a Democratic president. And she somehow leverages the ownership of Fox News and finds some business pressure point for Rupert Murdoch and says, if you want this business deal to go through, I want some changes at Fox News. And the changes I came up with were to put you in charge of Fox News. Me, Tim Miller, not you, the people. Correct. Tim Miller. I'm not drawing an equivalent between New and Bari Weiss. I think Bari Weiss is talented, not as talented as you. I was thinking of someone who was just kind of an ideological apostate, right? She was kind of a liberal who's kind of realigned on the right and you're kind of the opposite. But, you know, so she kind of calls herself a centrist or a former liberal or whatever she is. But functionally, she's on the right side now. And functionally, you know, even if you still have your Republican DNA, you're on the left of center, in coalitionally anyway. And so the theory of the case here is if that happened, if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came in and forced a deal where she put me in charge of Fox. And, you know, as part of that, I gave myself a primetime interview show where I would interview members of the administration fawningly. I don't think that that'd go over very well. with Republicans. Right. No, no, the conservatives would be out in the streets. They would, I mean, they would, they would say that, you know, the government has fallen. This is the worst dictatorial act in the history of the United States of America. And instead, they're simply acting as if it's, it's not even worthy of discussion, that that you can defend what's going on in CBS without even referencing that fact. I appreciate the comic because I get into this argument. Obviously, we're in media circles, so people want to talk about this a lot, the media gossip and up. People are like, you know, leaks out of the morning meeting at CBS. Every time I say this, I'm like, I don't actually care that much whether, I mean, I played a little bit of Tony yesterday. I like to make fun of. you know, silliness across the media spectrum. But like, it doesn't matter meaningfully, like what this anchor, the CBS News is saying on night-to-night basis. Like, it doesn't. That is not what is going to make or break, you know, our democracy, our Democratic Republic. But it does matter a great deal. that the president of the United States is able to bully media corporations into getting friendly voices across a wide variety of media and social media networks. Like, that matters a lot. I get a message from time for people who are who like. some of the folks that Barry is brought in to CBS. They are individually people that are acting in good faith. And I might disagree with them on this issue or that issue, but they're honorable. They're people that are with integrity. And my response to that is maybe they are, but like they signed up for a corrupt program. The deal was corrupt. Like getting Barry in there was corrupt. And so everything that happened as a result of that.

is part of that corruption, whether or not, like, each individual action or each segment on the news, you know, is, is accurate. That's right. I mean, and that was the Viktor Orban playbook that you leverage the high points of business and media and you make sure that your loyalist control. control all those spots. And they're literally following this, you know, step by step. So it's incredibly serious and incredibly concerning. And the fact that CBS isn't Fox News now, that it's, you know, it's still doing real reporting is, I suppose, slightly reassuring, but that doesn't mean the process by which they've... arrived at this is legitimate. And it doesn't mean we shouldn't be afraid about where it's going. I mean, maybe they're just taking it slowly and going step by step and walking us to a place where CBS becomes like Fox News in five or ten years. I mean, it went slowly and hungry, right? It wasn't like overnight that, you know, all of the media outlets became Sputnik. Exactly. All right. In that counterfactory, you imagined President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And so. Let's talk about that possibility. Obviously, you think it's at least not crazy to throw it out there. What do you think is more crazier? The idea that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would become president or the idea that someone would put me in charge of a major network, which seems less likely? Boy, I can see both those things happen and get some point. I think me being in charge of a network is much less likely. Okay. You know, them trying to bully around and muck around to like give me a show, maybe. Putting me in charge of people, I find that very hard. Putting you in charge of, I think of, I think of, I think of, but I could see another network. Okay, I don't think so. But I appreciate that you have that confidence in me, Jonathan. I was on with David Frum on his podcast, which aired yesterday. We taped a little bit ago. And it was more meta. Great, great show. Everyone to listen. Thank you. It was off the news. And so it was a little more meta. about the bulwark and my personal ideological journey and sort of what we see is our mission and how, you know, our mission of fighting liberalism and fighting Trump meshes or doesn't mesh with the mission of some on the left edge of the coalition, particularly he particularly mentions so around an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and kind of how we deal with that and how we cover them and how we talk about it. We talked about that for a while so folks can go listen to my. lengthy explanation for how I see all that. But I'm wondering, you know, I used to be a Republican, right? But like you've always been on more of the center-left side of the existing Democratic coalition, even before we're all in a big fight against authoritarianism. So I'm wondering how you kind of think about that and coalition politics with the DSA types. So I've been harshly, harshly critical of the Republican Party for my entire career, which is now a little over 30 years. I thought they were headed towards a very bad place. And it turns out they were headed to an even worse place than I thought they were when I was way ahead of everyone else and saying, this party is pathological and cannot be trusted with power, which is what I've thought for a very long time.

The difference I have with some people on the left is they think that belief is in tension with criticizing Democrats and progressives when I disagree with them. And I don't think those things are intention. I think they go along together. It's like, you know, I... The complaint I get is, why are you complaining about one or two weeds in our front yard when the neighbor's yard is nothing but weeds? And my answer is that I don't want my yard to become like the neighbor's yard. That's why I want to stop the weeds now before they overtake the entire yard. And that's in some ways the most fundamental disagreement we've had on the left. is that people who look at the Republican Party and its dissent into fanaticism and authoritarianism, some people say, look how strong they are, look how successful they are. That's a model. Why aren't we doing what they are doing? And others are saying, that's a cautionary tale. We can't allow ourselves to become that way because then even if you can win an election, which I don't think that helps you win elections, especially on the left. You can't govern. You can't actually make people's lives better. All you can do is spread anger. It's not a good tool for improving anybody's lives. These kinds of authoritarian methods that have been overtaking their Republican Party are only good for shutting down dissent in gaining power and corruption and self-enrichment. They're not conducive to effective government. So that's, you know, really like a meta-philosophical debate I have. And so sometimes people on the left get frustrated that I will criticize the left and see that at odds with the anti-authoritarian project. And I see it as part of the anti-authoritarian project. I have a couple specifics for you on the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani of it, but just at this more meta level, two thoughts. One is... Just using the counterfactual you gave, right? I think that some people would listen to this idea that says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes in, uses some spurious regulatory power to bully Fox and shut down Fox or put me in charge of Fox. And they would hear that and say, great, good. Now we're getting rid of a problem. Right. Is that how you thought when you were imagining it? Were you thinking that was a good, was that a recommendation or a cautionary tale? It was not a recommendation. And I wasn't really trying to. You know, suggest that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has that authoritarian impulse in her. I don't see her as being, you know, really illiberal or authoritarian. I think she has some ideas I don't approve of, but I don't think she's dangerous. I don't either. Yeah. I mean, I think there are illiberal currents. on the left, but I don't really associate her with that. Well, just one more thing, and then I'll come back to ASC, is the thing that I'm most heartily agreed with in that monologue about why it's important to make sure there aren't weeds in their own yard is, I'd say the...

The impulse to want to create a left cult, you know, that is powerful, I think is also actually, I think it's a misjudgment politically, right? And I think that you see this show this most clear with Biden, not that there was a cult around Biden, but like, that a lot of times that the Democrats have done things that are politically damaging to themselves because. they weren't willing to like grapple honestly with the ways in which certain either policies or actions of democratic leaders were harming. their own mission. You know, Donald Trump has won two out of three elections. The first one extremely narrowly with a negative national majority. And the third one somewhat narrowly, but with a plurality. And they've lost every other election when he's not on the ballot during his era. He is not a popular politician. He's not a good politician. He's not a smart politician. I think to the extent that he's managed to be successful, he's been lucky, and he has benefited from failings by the Democratic Party. And I think it's important to understand that because I think some people on the left think his success means everything he's done is smart and therefore should be emulated by the opposing side, which is not the correct lesson. I see this at the Senate level, especially, where you see from Democrats, like, you know, we need more, you know, firebrand. candidates like do we need to learn for trump people that shoot from the hip more people that are going to bring out new voters who don't vote otherwise i was like wait a minute like that only worked for trump Kari Lake isn't a senator or governor harshal walker isn't a senator doug mastriano isn't a go back even longer into our history christine o'donnell isn't a senator right like the republicans have like blown a bunch of races by putting trumpy candidates up who just had the trumpy baggage but not the trumpy juice Right. And so, right. So when I'm translating those arguments on the left, what I hear is Republicans get to nominate unelectable candidates. Why can't we nominate unelectable candidates? Why are you only complaining when we are nominating unelectable candidates? We should get to do it too. I mean, if you actually think about it precisely, that's what you're saying when you're saying that we should be able to do all the things that they do. How do you assess Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani in particular, as I kind of covered with from? Because my point to him, like the short, the TLDR version of it, was both of them are like. have been eschewing some of the worst impulses of their fan base and of their pasts recently. And I think that's pretty notable. Why don't we just do this just for fun? I don't know if this is actually issuing a problem with when the DSA left, but I enjoyed it anyway. Let's listen to something that Zohran Mamdani said yesterday that I liked. Consider it or would you consider banning these crowdsourcing events because they can and sometimes do get out of hand?

I'm not going to be banning snowball fights or organized snowball fights. I've shared my thoughts with New Yorkers, and I continue to believe that what we are seeing in this response, this winter blizzard from the city workers as a whole, and that includes the hardworking men of the NYPD, is part of why the city is getting back on its feet, and I'm appreciative of that work. So there you go. There we have an illiberal reporter wanting Zohran Mamdani to ban the free association of snowball fights in the parks. And Zohran Mamdani fighting that illiberalism, saying, I'm a defender of liberty in a free country, you can throw snowballs if you want, and also simultaneously. I appreciate the cops. In a different quote, like we didn't play, said, if you're going to throw snowballs at somebody, throw it at me, don't throw it at the cops. That was perfect. That's great. That's good politicking from Zohran Mamdani. So both Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez come out of the Democratic Socialists of America, which I consider to be. a crazy group. Just based on their platform. If anybody questions that point, I would encourage you to just, rather than emoting in response, go to the DSA's website, read their platform. There's some crazy shit on there. And it tends to be dominated as a lot of far-left groups do by the craziest, most committed radicals within the organization. And you've had plenty of people who are well to my left. who said, like, I can't deal with this group anymore. The lunatics are running asylum. It's, you know, it's just life of Brian left-wing nuttery all the way down in DSA. However, I will say that both... Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been pragmatic in office, and especially more of late with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and all along with Zohran Mamdani. I think they both recognized that DSA is far to the left of even their constituency, their heavily, heavily blue districts that they represent. And they've been... much more pragmatic in office and understand that the Democratic Party is a coalition of which DSA can be at best a small part. So I think they're both smart and I think while they have objectives that I don't. really share in the sense that like my perfect world would look different than their perfect world. I think they've been impressive in their recognition. And Madani hasn't made a bad move in office yet. Well, I mean, those may come, but that hasn't happened yet. I didn't like the, we're going to be enforcing fines on composting. You know, in a free country, I can do it. I want with my Apple course. Fair enough. But besides that, it's a minor quibble. I'm in coalition with them easily at this point. Maybe that changes at some point.

Okay, really quick, two other things, and I'll let you go. Because it is about this kind of self-reflection and how we can help people in our coalition when there are two things that you've talked about that I just want to flag for people. One was you mentioned Gavin Newsom's California problems in an article. And you went through his record. I kind of knew it an abstract way that California's passed some crazy stuff while he's been governor. You actually read it. And... To the point we just laid out how Zohran Mamdani hasn't really done anything crazy yet. It's kind of weird that Gavin has seen more as a mainstream, whatever, Democrat. But if you look at his record, and it's much longer, there's much more time for crazy stuff to happen. There's a lot more stuff that you can imagine in random Republican ads. So give us the short version of that. Right. I mean, he's done all these things that are basically, you know, reverse engineered from Republican attack ads into policy. Some of them he's... had to, like, sort of face up to, right? It's like giving Medicaid benefits to illegal immigrants. I'm for that on the merits, but politically, that's absolutely toxic. I mean, you would just get destroyed on that if he was the nominee. I think the whole governing record is filled with things on, you know, education, like every bad education fad hit. California so hard. The anti being good at school stuff, basically, right? So the equity fads where we're going to basically take away algebra from high schoolers in eighth graders and slow everything down. And the, you know, the ethnic studies fads and the, you know, the left wing pedagogy hit the schools hard. Death row transitions you had on there. Right. Like all the things that Kamala Harris was was on record. You know, he was for those things as well. The whole abundance agenda was basically, as for Klein, looking at a state saying, like, why can't the Democrats in my state get anything done? And a lot of that stuff happened under Gavin Newsom. So it's just a really, really bad record that I think would be extremely harmful if he's been nominated. It doesn't mean he couldn't win. Everyone's got weaknesses, right? So, you know, JD Vance is the above, you know, he's not the greatest. So you could still. beat him, but like, I think Democrats should be aware of the vulnerabilities they'd be taking on by having this record of governance be saddling their candidate. I agree with that. That's someone who was... just earlier this week was like leading the charge, defending Gavin against the people who were saying that he was being racist when he said, I'm just like you. I got a 960 on my SAT. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like I was like a so stupid fake right wing outrage. In some ways, I don't know, I think maybe might have helped Gavin. So it's like the Streisand effect where people were like, a bunch of people were now learning that Gavin like was, you know, whatever. Also struggled in school. And also side point of like for all their outrage about like wokeism, Republicans will take the dumbest moves from the woke left and use them for themselves of like, oh, you're a racist because, you know, I'm going to impute some some hidden motive behind your remarks that was not in any way present in the text of what you said. They'll do all the, all that crazy stuff when it suits them.

Fake racial grievance peddling. Of course, they'll do it. The work right is a menace. Last thing, you mentioned education, and you're on this a lot. And I just wanted to give you a chance to pop off on it before we go because I was reading this Nick Christoph article whenever it was recently. And I'm here in Louisiana. There's talking about the Mississippi Miracle that you've been reading about, but really kind of a southern resurgence in education. It's Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and you never have to hand it to Jeff Landry, but to a slightly lesser extent. Louisiana. To a slightly lesser extent Louisiana. Mississippi and Alabama are still crushing us. But they've made some changes in their public education system. And it's like the stats are insane. And if talking about the two weeds in the yard, it's like if Democrats and Democratic governors aren't shamed by this, they should be. Mississippi is running circles around Massachusetts, Oregon, California, and education outcomes. Like Mississippi is now ninth in the country in reading. It is true across math and reading. If you're a black kid in Mississippi or Alabama, you are doing like orders of magnitude better. than black kids in California, Oregon, Massachusetts, and other blue states. You've been talking about this. Democrats used to be the party that talked about making public education good and caring about public education. And that was helpful both on the merits because we should make our public schools good, but also politically because there are a lot of moms out there who want good schools. And they've abdicated that a little bit. And it's time to recapture it. So I just want to let you cook on that for a minute. Right. So Clinton and Obama were education presidents. They cared a lot about education as policy. And they thought the politics worked well. That was a core Democratic Party promises. We will make the schools better if we vote for us. And they did make the schools better. But some of the things they did in order to make the schools better were upsetting to teachers unions. And teachers unions fought back. They won the war inside the Democratic Party. on education reform, and they turned education reform into a kind of dirty word. And in doing that, they basically abandoned any aspiration to make the schools better. The only thing they want to do with schools is just put more money into teacher salaries now. They don't have any kind of realistic plan to improve schools because any realistic plan to approve them does things that are upsetting to teachers unions. So... The result of that, you can see it in the polls, that people used to give Democrats enormous advantages on which party is going to do better for schools, and that advantage is gone. So I think people need to recognize that the change that the Democratic Party has undergone on education, going from Clinton Obama reform. to the Biden and post-Biden era where we just defer to teachers unions and everything, has had in addition to a policy cost that you can see in the southern surge in other places, it's got a political cost as well. It was one of the Democratic Party's best issues, and now it's gone. Kids need to learn how to read. I mean, part of it, some of this stuff is upsetting teachers unions. But one of the thing that Mississippi did is they said that you can't get out of third grade if you can't read.

which I don't see how that could be upsetting to teachers unions. Maybe it is in some way, but it's pretty easy policy change. It forces you to actually work with the low-performing kids. Right. And they did actually put more funding in in Mississippi for reading coaches to help teachers, to help low-performing kids. And, you know, the theory of the case is that if you just keep advancing kids that can't read, then they're not going to be able to learn anything out. They're not going to be good at math because you can't read the math problems. You know, it's fundamental. And for some reason, there's been this element, I think, particularly in blue states, really in a lot of places around the country, where it's like you don't want to hurt people's feelings, you know, and you don't want to crack it, you don't want to give kids Fs anymore. And now this is old man screams a cloud. But it's like, you know, sometimes you got to hurt people's feelings and say, hey, you can't go on to the next grade with your friends if you can't read. So you got to learn how to read. Right. So the unions are. They're part of it. I was kind of oversimplifying. They're the biggest source of opposition. But there's also just a kind of larger superstructure of opposition to education reform and to academic rigor that is kind of that the unions play into and have encouraged, but it exists outside of them as well. Part of that is social promotion, as you mentioned. But another part of what these other states are doing is just... having a tight script for how you teach reading. There's a science of how you teach reading. There's a right way and a wrong way. And the thing the unions don't like about that is they believe in teacher autonomy. They don't want to say, like, you've got to go A, B, C, D, E, F, G through these following steps. They want to let everyone follow their own special journey of how they want to teach the classrooms. And that works with great teachers, but it doesn't work with bad teachers. And that's where the rub is. And this is where they find, and maybe it'll be more palatable as a political tool to not blame the teachers' unions for this, but to blame the anti-common core right-wingers. We can use them as the boogeyman, too. You know, Jeb had to deal with this. They didn't want government. Government shouldn't be telling me in my school how we teach. And it's like, no, actually. When it comes to reading and that was the right-left coalition. Yeah, right. That was the Pinsler Coalition against education reform that took over at the end of the Obama era. It was the unions and the anti-education reform left. with the anti-government right that weakened federal education standards and brought us to where we are now. Jonathan Chait, I appreciate you very much. Thank you for coming on, being the sixth man. Tim Hardaway Jr. went to Michigan, right? Wasn't he Michigan? Sure did. There you go. He's the Nugget six man right now. So that's you. You are Tim Hardaway Jr. I'll send you a jersey. I love it. Everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow with an old friend of the show. See you all then. Peace.

The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.