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Conversations with Coleman
What Happens After Trump?: Why Tim Miller Thinks Politics Can’t Go Back
01:08:57
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A
Every once in a while, someone makes something that feels bigger. Not another Hollywood reboot, but a story built on courage, faith and meaning. The Daily Wire did just that with their new seven part series, the Pendragon Rise of the Merlin. Based on the book series by Stephen R. Loughead. It's a retelling of the classic King Arthur legend. The first official trailer just dropped and you should go check it out. In this world, while pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's visions ignite a civilizational rebirth. Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings. The Pendragon cycle Rise of the Merlin premieres exclusively on Daily Wire January 22, 2026. Go watch the full trailer now@dailywire.com welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Tim Miller. Tim Miller is a political commentator, MSNBC analyst and writer at large for the Bulwark. He used to be a Republican communications operative who worked for candidates like John McCain and Jeb Bush. But years later he became a leading Never Trump conservative and wrote the best selling memoir why We Did a travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell. In this episode, we talk about what it was like to be an openly gay Republican back in the 2000s. We talk about whether it's really true that fire breathing homophobes are often secretly gay themselves. We talk about how the Republican Party has changed since the days of John McCain. We talk about whether Trump's deportations are fascist in nature. We talk about why Trump's favorability numbers are declining so steeply. We talk about the Trump administration's bizarre policy of blowing up drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. We talk about whether the groipers have really infiltrated the Republican Party. We talk about conspiracy thinking on the right and much more. So without further ado, Tim Miller.
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B
Where I'm from, we don't wait for the highlights. We're watching live start to finish, no spoilers, no score alerts.
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A
I want to feel every play as it happens.
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B
And now on Fox one, you can stream all your favorite live sports. NFL Sundays, college football, nascar, mlb, postseason, and more. I'm talking those nail biter finishes.
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A
Those high octane moments that get the whole state buzzing.
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B
Like if the Cowboys ever actually get it together and win a game with Fox one, you get it all live. The passion, the plays, the pride. Fox won. We live for live streaming now.
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A
Okay, Tim Miller, thanks so much for doing my show.
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B
Hey man, happy to do it. Thanks for the invite.
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A
So I want to get into the sort of political news of the day, but you have a really interesting backstory. I've been reading your book why We did it, which came out a few years ago. Yeah, it's like, it's super interesting. Part memoir, part analysis of Trump's rise. So I assume some of my listeners will be familiar with you from the bull work. You have a great podcast you do there. But for those who aren't familiar, I want to get into your backstory a little bit more than I normally do with guests because it's so intimately tied to what's happening in the country right now. The Trump administration, what happened to the Republican Party. Your story is kind of like a mirror or a guide into what happened to the Republican Republican Party. So I guess take me back to your first interest in politics. How did you get into Republican politics at all? Where did that enthusiasm go come from?
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B
Sure. Thanks for reading the book. I did feel really good about it when it came out a couple years ago. Now that Trump's back in, I kind of, I feel like the timeliness of it maybe is a little as, you know, things change so quickly these days, but I'm hoping some of it still has some value. Look, man, for me, I always loved politics. My first interest in politics, I was really young. My folks weren't really into politics. My grandmother was just a big Republican, and she was like One of the 12 people that voted against FDR, kind of Republican. She defended Nixon to her grave, that type of Republican. And in 92, I guess it was, I was in elementary school and there was just something about Bill Clinton and the saxophone. And I was like, he's going to win. And my grandma said, Mimi. I called her, said no, and we bet on it. And I had moved to Colorado in the interim, and she sent me after Clinton won a $1 bill commemorating my victory. And I was hooked to campaign politics from then. It was like the last time I would be for a Democrat until Bill's life, whatever. 24 years later, I was attracted to the idea of free markets and free people with the Republican Party. My dad was an up from his bootstraps kind of guy. I bought into a lot of that. I bought into the shining city on the hill element of the Republican Party. And I started working in politics, interning and volunteering when I was a baby. And I was like 15 when I first volunteered on a governor's campaign in Colorado. And I was a late bloomer, so I looked like I was 11. People kept asking me where my dad was, where my parents were, and I was like, nowhere. I work here. So I got into Republican politics early and was a Republican operative basically from high school, all the way up through Trump.
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A
So you had the. The interesting and. And generative experience of being a closeted gay Republican and then an openly gay Republican long before that was accepted, I would say, in the mainstream GOP, we're talking like, 2007, right?
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B
Yeah.
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A
What was it like to be closeted and then to come out of the closet as a Republican operative?
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B
Yeah, it was eye opening, and I definitely think I wrote about that in the book and kind of informed. I'd already done the coming out of the closet thing and disappointing certain people and surprising other people. And so the leaving the party element of it was kind of small potatoes compared to that. You know, being in the closet sucks. And I always. I like to talk, you know, it's a little bit less of an issue now, but not totally gone where, you know, people feel uncomfortable coming out for various reasons. Family, self identity, otherwise. And I felt like. I remember being in the closet on a campaign in Iowa, and I was kind of under the impress. I was under the impression that everybody else around the campaign thought the same thing I did, but was faking it, that they were really for gay marriage and gay rights. And I just compartmentalized everything. And then one day, I don't know what got into me, and I started asking around the office, what's your personal opinion on gay marriage? And I found out basically everyone I worked with was against gay marriage. And. And that was a moment where I started to think early. I was like, maybe I am misaligned from this party a little bit more than I realized. And coming out was really huge for me. It was important. It was freeing. I think it allowed me to be much more honest with myself in a lot of ways. In a weird way, being in the closet makes you a liar. You lie all the time, and so it makes other types of lies easy. And so when I came out of the closet, I kind of turned over two leafs. I was like, I'm gonna be openly gay and super honest now. And I think that's something that served me well the past few years in my new job and being at first, being openly gay early. There are a lot of people that were gay and then retired or were gay and behind the scenes. But I was very public as a spokesperson at the RNC and elsewhere being gay. It's like I heard from a lot of closeted young Republicans during that period. I used to joke that I've had more People come out of the closet to me than like anybody in history. I don't know if that's really true, but I've had a lot for that reason because I was just public and that was great. I was meaningful. And you know, we just eventually that reached a point where like my ability to do that like did come into conflict a little bit with my job as a Republican spokesperson and that. That sucked.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, as much as elites have changed on the gay marriage issue, obviously, you know, 20 years ago being against gay marriage was bipartisan. Homophobia was a lot more acceptable in elite circles. I think there's been a massive change on that issue among elites. But the rest of society, I don't actually know. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if the challenges facing a closeted gay, you know, 15 year old today in most parts of the country are not that different than they were 30 years ago. As much progress as has been made, like sort of visibly.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I still think there's like a huge reserve of disapproval among normal people, you know, in America, to say nothing of worldwide, to say nothing of recent immigrant communities that weren't, didn't really participate in the liberalization on the issue that occurred in America in the past couple decades. So it's, it's definitely, I would say it's like in a way it's an underrated challenge because I think many people have checked that particular box as solved and, and it's not and it never will be, I think fully. But I think it's an underrated issue, actually.
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B
A lot of backsliding, I think. No, for sure. I think it's probably a little better now than it would have been 30 years ago because there's just more of a support structure. There's the Internet, you can find other people. You know, I think for a lot of people, even as recently as like the aughts, like it was like, I don't even know who' talk to about this. Right. And like that's a little bit better now. But no, I, I agree with you and I think I was very vocally against, you know, there was much criticism of the, of the way that this bill was described, just the don't say gay bill. And we could like talk about the details of that. But like the gist of that bill was that, you know, a parent could sue the teacher, sue the school. Right. If, if a teacher taught a lesson that like that, you know, discussed gender identity, but also like gay same sex attraction, any of that. And so like for me it's like, well, wait a minute. Like if you, you know, that might be not a big deal if you're living in Miami or whatever, but if you're in rural Florida and you're the one kid with gay parents, like, you go to school and they like ask you to do a family tree and like, you make a family tree that mentions your gay parents, or like, if you're the gay teacher at that school and you want to just like mention the fact that you have a husband and that, say that that exists, or a wife to a woman, um, like, you know, that's a real threat and that's a real free speech threat. That's a real threat for two people's, you know, ability to kind of live their life in a public spare sphere. And so. No, I'm with you. And I think that there's still real threats and that, that sometimes it's underplayed.
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A
Is there any truth to the view, I think is commonly held among liberal people that I know that when you see sort of fire breathing Republican homophobes that like, relatively often they're closeted gay themselves, or do you think that's just something that people kind of say? Because it's, it's. The irony would be funny if it were true.
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B
And I think there's some examples of that, for sure. I also, you know, we could do a whole podcast on gay sex if you wanted, but I don't, I think that I'm of the Kinsey belief, you know, Kinsey kind of leads it, that sexuality is a spectrum and that a lot of people who are like, basically like somebody that's like the inverse of me, like, I'm gay, right? But like, I don't know, like in a different time, in a different society, I probably would have had a wife. Like I could, you know, make it work. I think there are people that are the inverse of me. They're like basically straight, like have some same sex attraction or maybe had an experience or two. And I think that that is psychologically damaging, particularly if you're on the right or very conservative or in a conservative world. And so, yeah, I think it could be that like, you know, could mess with people's brain and, and, and contribute to homophobia. I think, I think that that is probably half, you know, I'm just kind of putting people on the couch as an amateur psychologist here. But I, I think that there's a little bit, there's something to that. I get a little bit frustrated with liberals sometimes. Sometimes liberals are a little too Excited to, like, do homophobic stuff about Lindsey Graham for my taste. And it's like, I can't. I can't. You know, it's like I've been wanting to make a gay joke, and I can't do it. And in. In the company that I keep unless it's at the expense of Lindsey Graham, you know, and it's like. I don't know.
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A
So, like, right now, like, the idea that Trump and Epstein, Trump and Clinton hooked up. Right. That's like, the big thing right now that everyone's having fun with. So I'm curious. You know, I. I learned. I learned from your book. You know, you were talking a lot about McCain in your book at the beginning, and it's so funny to look back on McCain now. It's the perfect demonstration of how the Republican Party has changed, because McCain rejected everything that Trump later embraced. In a lot of ways, you paint these stories in the book where McCain is facing. He's at a rally or he's at some campaign event, and every single question he's getting is about immigrants, immigrants, immigrants. They're bringing crime. This. We. We ought to build a wall. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing. We ought to deport everyone, even if, you know, even if it gets a little violent. And you can feel McCain trying to hold back this tide of anger, trying to channel it in the. In the direction of our better angels. Similar to his famous moment when. When he was asked about Obama's birth certificate and he shut it down, he said, no, Obama, he's an American. He's a.
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B
Of that.
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A
He really had this sense of guardrails and where the GOP went too far. And, you know what's interesting to me about that is when you look at how that relates to Trump's rise, what Trump really did was to embrace all of those sentiments, give them a voice, and in, you know, you can criticize that. You know, and. And I do criticize a lot of that, but it's. It also actually is an expression of what happens when democracy prevails in a way, and elites get rid of guardrails that actually might have been responsible guardrails. Right. Like, isn't Trump's rise in some way just an expression of really what. What McCain was trying to hold back, even though it was popular?
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B
Yeah, I. I mostly agree with that. I do. Particularly, I like how you. I forget the exact word he used, but, like, talked about how Trump was, like, basically a rejection of what McCain stood for in a lot of ways, and I agree with that. A lot of times I get from, you know, you must have changed so much to, like, go to like, be supportive of Democrats now and be opposed to Trump. And I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I think Trump would explain himself as a rejection of the type of Republicans that I supported. And so, like, I think that that's totally rational, that a lot of people that worked for John McCain would see him as a rejection of them and oppose what Trump was trying to usher in. To your point about these guardrails. Yeah. I mean, this is where the elites get rightfully maligned for a lot of the decisions over the past couple decades, but sometimes I feel like over maligned. There's good to guard rails, there's reason for guardrails. There's a reason why we had a constitutional republic. We have representative government, not direct democracy. Why don't we don't put everything to a poll of the people? You know, because there is value in having institutions and having responsible people in charge. It's fortunate some of the people in charge of those institutions have degraded them in various ways to lose trust. But I think it's pretty obvious that, like, yeah, the base of the Republican Party and Republican voters were much more nativist than Republican elites, and they overthrew the elites that weren't responsive to them. And there is a Democratic, like, small d Democratic element to that, for sure. And, and I think that, like, our politics is like a balance. Right. It's like figuring out how to balance that. Like, how are you responsive to your voters while also being responsible to ideals, rule of law. Right. Like, and the thing, you know, the other elements that, that have made this country successful. And, and it was a balance that was obviously got out of whack. I think that that led from, that led us from McCain to Trump.
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A
Yeah. You know, in retrospect, I was, I was someone that was afraid Trump was a capital f fascist in 2016. And over time, I've come to see him much more as a populist than as a fascist. And, and I've even come to understand some of his ideas as reasonable. Like, for instance, on immigration. My ideal immigration policy would be that we have lots of immigration, but all of it's legal. All of it's an outcome of the democratic system, as opposed to whatever crisis happens in Central America tomorrow that sends millions our way because of push factors rather than pull factors. And it would be something like points based, like Canada has had and so forth. And in order to have that immigration system, which I don't think would be popular on the nativist.
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B
Right.
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A
Because it would involve lots of people coming here. We would actually have to have a secure border. Right. So the idea of having a wall or some other physical barrier doesn't seem crazy to me. Like, if it already existed, I wouldn't say we need to tear it down. If we had a river dividing, you know, if we had like, like a body of water dividing us from. From Mexico, that would seem a good thing because then we, you know, it would just, it would just put us in the Australian position, right. That we, we choose who comes here and it's an outcome of the democratic system. And that preempts a lot of potential nativist anger and overreactions on the other side. And, and so that all seems actually reasonable to me, though it wouldn't have 10 years ago that I separate fully from the idea of deporting everyone who's already here, whether they're just.
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B
Before we get to the deporting, can I make a case for why it's not reasonable for me?
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A
Yeah, sure.
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B
I just, I just think this. I don't feel like I hear this in the public debate. I think a lot of people, even in the Democratic Party don't want to fight this fight. And so this argument is not espoused. But like, I don't, I don't think that we should be aspiring to be a country that has negative net migration, which is what was happening with this government. Right. Like, that's, that's it. I hear that you personally said you wanted to have a lot of people coming in legally, but this, But Trump doesn't. And I don't find their, any parts of their immigration policy reasonable. Like, sure. Like, should we have. Have had tougher border enforcement than we had during the Biden administration? Absolutely, absolutely. I agree. But like, this, this administration, like we are going to our country's migration levels this year, are going to be on the level of like, what you would have seen in Syria during the civil war, like Ukraine right now or Venezuela or China. Like places that are closed, countries that are not open, that are not open and free societies. Like, if nobody is trying to get to this country and is able to come in, like, that's a sign that things aren't going well in the society for me. And I don't, I just, I mean, I also obviously totally reject what they're doing on the interior of the country. And we can talk about that. And I do think it's fascistic. What, what their, what their deep. With the way that they have been executing their deportation regime. But yeah, I mean, like, I, I, you could sell me on the fact that, you know, a more, you know, a stronger border than what we saw during Biden, like, of course. But I, I don't, I don't think zero in and many out is, is a good immigration policy for this country economically or, you know, or, or will it yield the type of society that we want to be?
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A
Sure, totally agree. I think you definitely want net positive migration. I mean, the countries in the world that have, you know, famously closed borders like Japan and South Korea, their populations are cratering, their public services, which are always a Ponzi scheme, you know, based on having enough kids to support the elderly, that's all going in the wrong direction. China suffering, population collapse, those are not the countries that are going to inherit the future. In, in my opinion, I think the American, the broadly pro immigrant position that America has staked historically is one of the reasons we've been as strong a country as we are. Nevertheless, it seems to me there is a difference between border security and deportations. Like, they tend to go hand in hand. Hand in hand, vibes wise.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But border security just makes a lot of sense, sort of regardless of what your immigration politics are, just from a political perspective and from an order perspective, whereas deporting anyone who's here illegally once they're already here, to me is a totally different policy. Right. And that's, that's something where I really, I align with liberals fully that basically, once you're here, unless you have a criminal record, I don't want to see ICE pulling you off the street in masks. I don't trust the current administration to do that in a way that's orderly or just or fair or sending people to the right places. And actually, I don't think that I'm not, it's not even clear to me that that's what people were voting for when they voted for Trump. I think people were voting for her, for him to create order at the border. I don't think they were. They were voting for him to deport everyone that's working, that's trying to find jobs in a Home Depot parking lot. It's enormously disruptive for American businesses, small businesses especially.
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B
Why don't you think that's fascistic then? I don't. Just like out of curiosity, you said you would have thought that he would have been fascist in 2016 and have thought less. So now. It's hard for me to look at what ICE and CBP are doing and not See that as somewhere on the fascist kind of, Like, at least directionally.
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A
Directionally, perhaps. I guess I've never, I've never. I've never associated a country having really strong nativist politics where you get, like, get deported if you're there illegally to be inherently fascist. Like, if I. If I, you know, most countries in the world, if I overstayed my visa, I would get deported and it would suck. And they might have a way more restrictionist policy than I would personally want for America to have. But I've never categorized that as fascism. I've tended to categorize fascism as, like, what you do with the citizens of your country.
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B
Well, yeah, sure. Well, but I mean, we're jailing citizens sometimes because the enforcement is so intense. I mean, I think if we looked at another country. I hear what you're saying about overstaying the visa. If you look to another country and we saw massed agents of the state going up to people based on how they looked and saying, can I see your papers, please? And if they didn't provide the right paperwork, throwing them in detention, I don't think we would hesitate to call that fascist. I don't. You know, I mean, it's not North Korea. It's not Hitler. Right. Like, there's a huge spectrum of fascism from, like, Orban or whatever to North Korea, but it certainly is not in the American tradition. It doesn't speak to individual rights. I mean, I'm in New Orleans right now. These guys are here. I got a video sent to me by a friend whose friend is Filipino. Walked outside from his office at work. He was going to his car, got a bunch of guys in masks come up to him, say, are you a citizen? Let me see your id. The guy is a citizen. I don't know how to what. And I can. What other word would you use besides fascist for that? Like, this guy's getting hassled by masked agents about his citizenship status outside of his job.
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A
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. That has all the optics of fascism, but like any major political term there is. It's not. It's a gray area. You know, the point at which you call a state becomes fascist from being a liberal democracy is not all at once or it's not overnight. It's.
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B
It's.
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A
It is. There's judgment involved. Right, let's. Like, like, when do we say that something's no longer a democracy? Is it the first time someone denies an election? Is it when election. You know, if. If you prove to me one election was stolen in American history, which is like, you know, like you go back to like 1870 or whatever or 18 John Quincy Adams, like did some election maneuvering, you know, does that mean the US stopped being a democracy? Or do you judge it on what the, what the tenor of events is most of the time for most people? Right. So my, my, my sense that, that, that Trump administration hasn't yet turned America into a fascist country is more of a judgment call. I agree with you. The idea of mass people coming up to you on the street asking you for your papers based on how you look like is that, that is fascism. To the extent that that actually becomes a norm in America, that would be, be a fascist norm. But the question is, is this a four year blip and we're going to go back to America as normal? This actually one of my questions for you, is this a four year blip because of Trump's uniqueness as a personality, as his own charisma, that he has his cult following, that he has the way in which he is so abnormal for a Republican politician? Is that, is that, is that a four year blip and we'll go back to normal American politics or is this signaling a direction for the future? We're likely to be contending with this style of politics for our lifetime.
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B
Well, I mean we're year 10 really, you know, in the second term is four years, but he's been now the leader of the Republican party for about 10 and so that's a long time. You know, I don't, I speak on a college campuses. I know you do. It's like if you're a 19 year old college student right now, you don't even remember Mitt Romney's campaign. Like you don't remember the Romney Obama campaign. You don't know anything about what Republicans are besides Trump. And so if you are a 19 year old who's chosen to join the Republican Party party, you've chosen to join it because you like what Trump is about. Like policy wise, aesthetically, maybe not everything. Right. But generally that's what appeals to you. And so to me, a, I don't think this is a blip. I don't think it's something that we, I don't even like thinking about in those terms. Like it might be a blip, we might go back to normal. It's like that's not how things work. Like time, the linear nature of time is such that things only go forward. Like we can change some things in the future, but we can't go back to how things were before. And we certainly are not going to stop what these guys are doing, particularly on the immigration front and particularly on the law enforcement front, if people don't fight it right now. And so I think that it's possible things will change. I think the Republican Party will mostly reflect, you know, kind of Trump's nationalist kind of America first type policies and affect going forward. I think that's what Republican voters want. That's what most right wing parties are throughout the world. Like this sort of idea that it's a classical liberal, as I mentioned earlier, free markets and free people type parties. Those are, we're really only the dominant right wing parties in the Anglosphere. It's like US and Canada, Australia, England, like most of the world, the right wing party is a blood and soil nationalist party. And I think that's what will happen here, has happened here. And so, yeah, I think that those of us who oppose that are in for a long fight. I think that if Trump loses next time and leaves the stage, there will be some things that will go back to quote, unquote, normal. Right? Like, Trump is unique in various ways. Like, you know, his, like Putin, his love for Putin, like a weird affinity for dictators. Like, like, will the next Republican also feel that way? I don't, you know, I don't know. Well, they, will he do that? Will they do the weird stuff that he does in campaign speeches? Like he's sui. Generous. Generous in a lot of ways. Right. But I think that idea, ideologically, I think we, we see the direction of the party and it's towards America first.
- [29:28]
A
So how do we understand Trump's terrible favorability numbers right now? Like he's a Harry Enton on CNN who is great with, with all this stuff. And as, you know, as much flack as CNN gets from people on the right and even in the center, I've never seen Harry Enton's political analysis or breakdown that isn't just down the middle numbers based. So he did a great segment on just like how kind of unprecedented Trump's decline in favorability has been in the first year of his presidency to the point where it has to be that he is losing Republicans who voted for him. Something like, you know, 10% of the people who voted for him, if not more, are really disturbed and have a negative opinion. Where does that come from? Which policies are actually unpopular with, with even Republicans and which, which, which are popular?
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B
Well, I think two things are happening. One is he, he's losing some people that you wouldn't even really Think of traditionally as Republicans. Like he brought in a lot of folks in this last time who are unhappy with the, unhappy about Biden's age. I didn't feel like that the administration, Biden, Harris administration was serving them. They're unhappy with a lot of the COVID stuff. And these are people that voted for Trump only the third time, right. Like either they're their first time voters or they pass voted for Democrats. So I think he's losing a lot of those people, right, Because I think that they thought they were signing up for something different than they were signing up for. They thought they were signing up for the guy that had the press conference with the groceries and was going to focus on getting grocery bills now and was going to get us out of war. And so I think that is one the last people in, I think are the first people out of the boat. And I think we're starting to see that. And then I think he's also got softness, interestingly with people that are more into the America first populism. I don't know that he's losing any ground with Wall Street Journal type college educated Republicans who voted for him. There's a bunch of those types of voters that were my people, bulwark people who left in 16 and haven't come. But those that stayed, the college educated finance types, I think they're pretty happy so far. They might not like the tariffs, but generally are still with them. I think the people he's losing are the Marjorie Taylor Green crowd and the people that listen to the manosphere. I listen to a lot of Tim Dillon, my pulse on that sort of stuff. He's a comedian, kind of maga ish. And he's like, what do we do? He's like, I thought I signed up for taking care of our own people first, you know, going after the power, the entrenched powers, you know, going after the, the elites, as you mentioned earlier. And instead what I've got is tax cuts for rich people, deregulation for AI, you know, trillionaires, you know, we got a new ballroom funded by the richest people in the world. We're still, we have a new war apparently in the Caribbean now. You know, we're still involved in, in Ukraine, still involved other places. I think a lot of America first types are unhappy with him right now and I think that he's losing ground with them.
- [32:42]
A
Hey, Coleman here, if you're enjoying the show, then you probably care about how political decisions really get made. If that's you, I want to tell you about the new podcast On Notice, produced by the nonpartisan newsroom Notice. Each week, journalist Reece Gorman sits down with lawmakers for candid conversations, not just about the headlines, but about what makes them tick and what brought them to Washington in the first place. On Notice gives you an insider's view of the people shaping policy in the U.S. reese's approachable style has earned him trust on both sides of the aisle, unlocking unguarded conversations that you won't hear in traditional interviews. So tune in to On Notice. That's notice spelled N o T u S. It's available every Monday wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube. This episode is brought to you by NBA on Prime. This Tuesday at 8:30 Eastern, it's the Emirates NBA cup championship game on Prime. This year's quest for the cup has been building to this the championship game live from Las Vegas. Not a Prime member sign up for a 30 day free trial to get started today. The Emirates NBA cup championship game this Tuesday at 8:30 Eastern only on Prime. Restrictions apply. CM Amazon.com Amazon prime for details. So what do you make of the Caribbean slash Venezuelan drug boat story? Because this is, it's, it's hard for me to integrate into Trump's politics. So, you know, obviously I think Trump likes to look tough. He likes to pick an unsympathetic victim. And drug dealers are unsympathetic victims for most people. So if you could do whatever you want to them, even if it's wrong, a lot of people won't want to be seen as defending drug dealers. So I think he, in that sense, he has a good political instinct. On the other hand, like, this is one of the, this is just one of the most clearly unconstitutional, unfounded, frankly ridiculous foreign policy moves that I've sort of witnessed in my lifetime in terms of we're literally just killing dozens and dozens of people who we're not at war with, who are not terrorists by any conventional definition of terrorism. And apparently a lot of people are defending it, which shows really, if you.
- [35:03]
B
Can do this, who is for it? I don't understand. I know Marco's for it. And maybe I'm not as familiar with the people in the Free Press. Oov and so maybe some of your colleagues are for it. I don't mean this sarcastically, like who's for this? I don't know.
- [35:15]
A
It's hard to find it. I think many people at the Free Press are for it. But I've seen people, I'm talking about right wingers on Twitter. I see defending it.
- [35:23]
B
I Guess I see mostly like anti, anti defenses of it. Right. Like you'll see and maybe I'm missing something but I see a decent amount of right wingers saying like, oh, oh, if you complain about this you're on the side of the drug dealers or like, oh, the libs are winning.
- [35:35]
A
That's what I mean.
- [35:36]
B
Yeah, okay, but like making an affirmative case, like I'm really excited about this and I think that we should be bombing boats in the Caribbean and maybe doing a land war in Venezuela is nonsensical to me. I think something gets lost. I just like to bring up from time to time because it's something I'm obsessed with is we wrongly sent Venezuelans already this year to a foreign gulag. We sent people that were not gang members, that were not criminals, that were asylees trying to get into this country to an El Salvador prison based on their tattoos. We did that this year. And so now you're going to tell me six months later after we did that and luckily they got out because two other despots made a deal, Maduro and Bukele, to get them out. But now we're bombing Venezuelans in the sea in the Caribbean and we're just supposed to say take their word that these are drug dealers that are bringing drugs to America. I don't see any evidence of that. They haven't provided any evidence. The evidence we see is like, oh, even when people say we think that they're drug dealers, it's like, well actually they were going to go to Suriname and then the drugs were going to go to Europe. And so I'm against summary execution of drug dealers. I don't think that's what we should be doing in this country. But even if you were for it, they haven't even demonstrated that these are people bringing dangerous things to this country. It's insane. The policy is insane.
- [37:05]
A
Yeah. I mean my worry is that people are focused on the wrong aspects of the story. You know, obviously it one has less sympathy for drug dealers than for commercial fishermen or any other kind of commerce. But let's say the evidence dropped tomorrow and it was really solid and they are all drug dealers. I don't think that that makes it okay that our new policy is just to just to bomb drugs randomly in the ocean, which, you know, it seems to me it's not anywhere near coherent anti drug trafficking policy. Like if Trump came out and he said, look, we've got a huge drug problem in this country, we've got, you know, we're going to Identify the top sources of drugs, which are invariably going to be Mexican or Chinese. In the case of fentanyl or whatever, we're going to come up with a super coherent strategy to go hardcore on whatever that is. Okay. At least that would make sense, right? That would be passably in the American interest, but just bombing. But, you know, people are all focused on this second strike issue, right? Like, the second strike was somehow a lot different than the first. To me, it doesn't matter if they were really terrorists. If Al Qaeda or ISIS had boats in the Caribbean and they were trying to do terrorist, they were essentially trying to kill Americans. In some ways, you could do 15 strikes, I wouldn't really care. But the point is they're not terrorists. And so the first strike is the problem, really, not the second. But all of this then raises the question, if you're right, and really not many people are defending this except in this anti anti way, then what is Trump thinking? Does Trump have any kind of political calculus here, or is this Marco Rubio's pet project and he's in Trump's ear? What do you make of it from their perspective?
- [38:51]
B
I think it's a Rubio and Stephen Miller project. And I think that, you know, look, it's hard for me to get inside Trump's brain at this point, and the types of Republicans that used to call me, my old colleagues in the first term, they don't call me anymore. I'm pretty far afield. So I'm speculating as much as anybody else. But I mean, I think that if Trump wanted to go into a land war, we might have done it already. And he seems to be a little bit hesitant on that. There's been a lot of smoke around that for a while now, and nothing's happened. So that tells me that there's at least a little hesitancy from Trump himself. And I think this is basically a combo of Marco is still a neocon at heart, and he feels like he can get away with it in our hemisphere and has personal issues for good reason. Not liking Central American, South American Communists. I don't like them either, but it doesn't mean we should be engaging in wars against all of them. And then I think Stephen Miller sees this as is all part of the immigration package. He wants the maximum authority possible for deportations and for surveillance and for militarization as part of the effort. And if you can make the case that we're at war with whatever Central American drug traffickers and human traffickers, and that's part of the People that are coming to the country, then, you know, that gives you more. That gives him more whatever legal cover for advancing the deportation regime. And I think that there's this notion that if we're in an emergency state, if we're in a war, you have more tools at your disposal. That's what I think is happening.
- [40:38]
A
Yeah, it's right. I mean, every possible goal I construe in my mind, I find hard to match with the action. So if the goal is regime change in Venezuela or something like it, I would be open to that conversation. I don't think military regime changes have worked very well in. In the past couple decades. I don't think the American public actually has the stomach to finish the job. And with regime change, you get 100% of the benefit only if you clear the last hurdle. So, you know, half measures are much worse than no measures at all. But even if regime change were the goal, say that's what. That's what's in Rubio's. That's what's on his wish list. How does bombing drug boats in the Caribbean actually connect to regime? Like, even with that goal in mind, this particular set of actions doesn't make any sense.
- [41:27]
B
We see so Tanker today. You know, maybe it's hoping that Maduro self. Self. Regime changes. You know, like the idea that he, like, he feels enough pressure that he just, you know, looks for an out and, you know, gets Putin to give him the Assad treatment or whatever and goes to flee. Maybe that's what's in their mind. But I hear, I also just like, what is the point again? Look, I used to be a neocon. If you told me five years ago that we have this mass displacement crisis and all these Venezuelans are coming to America and there's a existing party in Venezuela that was rightfully elected and they were cheated. And if we can use some levers to put pressure on the existing regime, then maybe we can, you know, get the, you know, rightfully elected democratic leader in there and that could ease some of the migration issues that is. That is facing all of us. I probably wouldn't have been for that. Like, that's at least rash. That's these irrational. What would even be the point of receipt? Like, that already happens. Like, all the. All of the Venezuelans already left. You know, I mean, like, there's some. So I guess more, you know, could still flee the country. But, you know, that wave of Venezuelan, you know, refugees like Siles, like that already happened. So I don't. I don't know. Man, yeah. I'm as lost as you to me. It's crazy. It's insane what they're doing.
- [42:56]
A
So a couple weeks ago Rob Dreher wrote a piece in which he was sort of reporting from firsthand experience the extent to which the Republican Party has been infiltrated by Men under 30 Women who are in the Fuentes wing of the Republican Party. The party, the so called gripers.
- [43:18]
B
Yeah.
- [43:19]
A
And you know, if I recall he was saying he was giving numbers like 30 or something, like really, really large numbers that suggest there's a wave of people who have groiper type politics that are the future of the Republican Party. You know, it's hard, it's hard to know what's going on. I never meet these people. I would never meet these people at this point in my life because I'm too much a public opponent of Fuentes ism and all the rest. But what do you, how big an influence do you think that sort of Nick Fuentes has had on the Young Republican Party? Do you think he's the direction of the future? What do you make of all that?
- [43:56]
B
I don't know if he's a direction of the future. And some of this stuff is like you're slicing this stuff kind of thin, you know what I mean? It's kind of thin. So I guess I'll speak to what I do feel comfortable talking about first is, you know, look, Adam Smith, man, supply and demand works and everything. Like what is the like when it comes to recruiting Republican operatives? Right, right. Now as I said earlier, it's been Trump for 10 years. Who are the types of people that are volunteering, that are wanting to show up, that are wanting to go work for these campaigns? It's gonna be Trumpy type people. And so now do they go all the way to being Fuentes? I think probably some of them. That is what is appealing. I don't like who is. I did a. I was working on a story I never wrote on like the New York Young Republicans, like a Gavin Wax who's kind of a popular maga, right. Young Republican type. And I remember he was making a joke about how nobody goes to like he goes, I go to the Manhattan Institute and the National Review, happy hours and it's like a morgue. You know, everyone there is 60 plus. Like that type of politics just has no appeal with young Republicans. So it's not surprising to me that it's very MAGA people that are populating these offices. And I went to every year at the end of the year, I Went to America Fest, which is a Turning Point USA conference that Charlie ran, and they're doing it again this year. I think I might take a skip on it this year. But I basically went just to kind of learn. Like, I'm just curious what's happening? Like, why are people here? Like, what is it? And I'd asked the young guy, it's mostly guys. Not entirely. I'd ask them, like, why are you here? What drew you here? And it's like, across the board. Anti Woke. I hate Woke. I hate Closer to Covid. A few years ago it was. I hated the COVID rules. I don't like the wars. I don't think we should be involved in the wars at all. And then some economic concerns. That's it. That's the type of people that they're drawn in. It's not tax cuts, regulation cuts and strong military. And pro life. There's some pro life. There's some Christian element in there too, I guess I should say. But it's a different crop than the old Republican crop. Now, how many of them are just in the Josh Hawley mode and versus how many of them are like, Nick Fuentes, active, racist, misogynist. That's hard for me to divine. And like you, I don't know that they'd tell me. Right. If they had those views really. But I think that, at least just to get a sense, I wasn't surprised by Rod's reporting, I guess, just given what I saw from. For the turning point crop.
- [46:30]
A
So what do you make of the. The mainstreaming of those ideas on Republican, let's say the. The most popular platforms on the right? I guess I can. You can broaden the question. You know, 10 years ago, like Republicans, what were the most popular shows? I mean, people watch Fox News and, you know, before that, people listen to Rush Limbaugh and all that stuff. If you look at who. Who are those people today, it seems to me it's Candace Owens, it's Tucker Carlson, and there's been this embrace of pure conspiracy. You know, Tucker Carlson was mauled by demons, allegedly. He knows that they're, you know, alien. They're aliens that are living underneath the ocean and they've been there for 50,000 years. And Israel's behind absolutely everything, including the murder of Charlie Kirk and all this. All this crazy stuff. And it's not to say that conspiracy hasn't had a place in American politics forever, but it does seem to me to be playing a more central role on the right than it has at any point in My life. Is that like a recency bias or do you think there actually has been the right is more conspiratorial?
- [47:45]
B
Well, I mean look, I have tds, obviously I'm going to blame this on Trump, but I do think Trump ushered in a lot of this. Trump was, if you look back at 2016, Ben Shapiro basically leaves Breitbart because of this. And so this isn't that new in that sense. This fight was happening back then in 2016 between Cruz type true conservatives and MAGA types that were more nationalist and also more conspiratorial. And that fight is still happening now. Ted Cruz and Tucker just had it out on his podcast a couple months ago. And so I think that, that you know, it is supercharged lately and I think if you look at the charts, it's pretty alarming. You know, of the podcast charts about who the big, the big names are and you just mentioned most of them and, and you know, I think that that is, that's going to continue. I think that the, that the big platforms have a responsibility for this. I don't know about you, but just as like this is a one man consumer. I'm getting fed a lot of Tucker, a lot of Candace, a lot of other related Nick fuentes on my TikTok for you page when I'm like trying to scroll through, I'm not getting fed a lot of, you know, I don't know what would be the, what would be the like normal Wall Street Journal, like typical Republican stuff these days. I don't see a lot of that. And, and I think that the platforms are responding to like, you know, there's people watch it because they hate watch it. People watch it because it's titillating. It's interesting. You know, that's why National Enquirer was at the, when you went to the supermarket when we were kids was National Enquirer. That was there right by the checkout lane, not the Atlantic or the Economist or whatever. You know, it's titillating. And so I don't know how to fix that really. But it's, I think it's objectively happening.
- [49:48]
A
Happening now it's interesting to me that you trace it back to Trump because Trump has always, for all his flaws seemed to me to be fairly non conspiratorial. And I'll issue a big qualification to that.
- [50:02]
B
But what about, I mean his whole rise in the party was based on the idea that Barack Obama was an African and not a legitimate president. Like that's how he became if he had not done that, he would never have been the president. So his whole career was premised on conspiracy. And then there was the election fraud.
- [50:18]
A
Okay. So I was gonna issue some qualifications.
- [50:20]
B
Well, those are two pretty big ones.
- [50:23]
A
But hear me out. If, if, if I'm, when I'm looking at Tucker and Candace and the, the kind of conspiracies that they're trafficking in, they are, there's demons that are mauling them. Can Charlie Kirk is coming to Candace Owens in a dream. You know, Epstein is blackmailing world leaders. People are having people killed. I mean, spiritual entities. Like this is like, are we sure.
- [50:53]
B
Epstein wasn't blackmailing any world leaders?
- [50:56]
A
Look, there's no solid evidence of it. It could, could come out to be true, all that. Look, I, I, I follow Michael Tracy on a lot of this stuff. I think he's very good. And if you actually look at it just from a pure. What is there hard evidence for?
- [51:09]
B
Yeah.
- [51:10]
A
Rather than insinuation of what could have been true and what might be true, a lot of things might be true. I don't see hard evidence for it. I think it's kind of a moral panic and an obsession in the culture, the Epstein story, in terms of the conspiracies surrounding it. But that's a whole nother rabbit hole to go down. My point is that if, if I look at Trump, most of the conspiracies he claims to believe is either things that just like directly benefit him. Like, I won the election and I'm never going to say that I lost. So I'm going to invent whatever I need to say in order to be personally self interested and get this win. Or I agree with you, the Obama one. To me, I class that more in Trump's nativism than in conspiracy thinking per se.
- [51:56]
B
He doesn't go in on stuff though. I, look, I agree. Trump is not, I feel like Tucker.
- [52:02]
A
Sorry, let me just say one more thing. Like if you, if you, if you ask Trump about UFOs or whatever, you can tell he just doesn't take any of that stuff seriously. Whereas that's like endemic to what's going on at the conspiracy. Right. For example.
- [52:14]
B
Yeah, I just think he opened the door to it, I guess. I agree with you that Trump is not like Candace is, Candace has lost her mind. Candace is literally like there's a, you know, simultaneously is trying to tell people that there's like a French and Israeli assassin coming to kill her while she's at Dollywood. Like, it's like, you know, and it's Hard to even, like, grasp. It's not. It's either a total show or she's totally lost touch with reality in either way. That is a category difference from Trump, for sure. But we started the conversation talking about the gatekeepers around immigration, and I was saying that I think sometimes the old elites and the old gatekeepers are wrongly impugned because there's some value in having them. And maybe they were out of touch with the regular folks in various ways and maybe they needed to have their cages rattled to wake up to that. I'm for all that, but once you just eliminate the gatekeepers, once you just tear them all down and say it's all fake, it's all fake news, Enemy of the people. Even Fox is fake when it's not benefiting to Trump. The last president was fake. The last two Democratic presidents were fake. Obama was an African and Joe Biden was always run by the auto pen. Once you convince everybody that everything's fake, there's no, you know, there's no gatekeepers like that. You can't trust any of the news. I just don't think it's, like, then surprising then that people will come in and come in his wake and advance even more kooky and extreme stuff. Like, to me, I think that there is definitely a connection.
- [53:52]
A
Yeah. I mean, so, but then what role would you assign to just how media has changed in general? Because, you know, with social media, smartphones, the. You know, there's been this massive democratization, you could say, of influencers, Meaning if I'm a rando with a unique level of charisma, an ability to connect to people, a sense of humor, whatever it is, I can just get an account on Rumble or TikTok and just become the next source of your political opinions. That literally wasn't possible in, you know, 2010. Like, there were just so many elements, so many veto points you'd have to check in order to even get your face in front of a million people. And is it possible that when we democratize media, obviously there's good elements to that? Like. Like the bulwark can exist, the free press can exist. I can have a podcast, you can have a podcast and people can find us. That's a good element. I would count both of those as good. But the bad element is that perhaps conspiracy thinking sort of wins in a truly free marketplace of ideas with no barrier to entry. And maybe that's just a kind of sad commentary on human nature. That's how I see it.
- [55:05]
B
Yeah, maybe. I guess. I have two thoughts I don't want to take away agency away from the leaders and plenty of failures of the Democrats. We could talk about it all day. I mean, the way they protected Biden was awful. And I'm happy to talk about it. But the Republican leaders have totally abdicated any obligation to advancing the truth. And that was most significantly notable during the 2020 election. I mean, everybody knows it wasn't stolen. Every single member of Congress and There were what, 10 Republicans in the House and seven in the Senate that actually spoke up and they've all been cast out of the party. And all of the main news anchors and all of the main pundits at some level went along with that hoax. Like, sorry, you know, you can't go along with a massive hoax at that level and then say, and then, you know, when people start not believing that, that our democracy is real and start believing other conspiracies, you can't start looking around and going like, who's responsible for this? It must be the changing nature of our media environment. It's like, no, like, people, people have agency. So that's one. I will also say the algorithms are contributing. I think that if you go back, if we could just roll back the clock, changing our news feeds, going back to Facebook from being like, you're getting things from people you've chosen to follow, you've opted in to follow. Changing from that to a computer is going to feed you the thing we think you're most likely to have an emotional response to. I just, I think we should. You know, I'm a free speech person, but I think at some level we need to put some regulations on this and I think we need to learn the lesson for AI because I think it's had disastrous consequences. And I think, I don't think there's anything by nature wrong with phones or social media, but I do think that a lot of, you know, the richest people in the world really are getting wealthy on the backs of, like, getting everybody angry at each other. And I think that we probably should have been able to put some kind of basic constraints on how people got information. Maybe that wouldn't have worked. By the way, I'm open to that wouldn't have worked. And as you say, it's just human nature and technology and it's tough to. You can't control the barbarians. Maybe, but I don't know, I look back and think maybe that would have been. Have helped us had we stuck with the old newsfeed.
- [57:39]
A
To your first point, I think one of the best critiques of Republicans over the past year as a party is that, you know, when Democrats lost in 2024, there were at least elements of the party that were asking the question, what did we do wrong? How can we avoid this mistake? Again, let's look inward. Now. I'm not saying that was the majority of the party. There's obviously plenty of people that wanted to stick their head in the sand and say, we're perfect and it's just bad luck and blah, blah, blah. But there were some conspiracies, by the.
- [58:08]
B
Way, on the left. I get, I hear from people, like, who come up to me and say, isn't it the. You know, that wasn't. Weren't the machine? Didn't Elon break the machine? So, like, there's left conspiracies too, for sure. Not. And it's not really among the elected officials, but like, among, like the media.
- [58:21]
A
There's an element of that. There's an element of that. There's, there's, there's elements of apologism. But there was a serious conversation had in mainstream media among Democrats and Democratic strategists about, what did we do wrong? How did we lose this one? How did we lose this one to the guy that we thought was done forever because he, you know, for so many reasons, when Republicans lost in 2020, the whole party just rallied behind. No, we didn't. We know we didn't lose.
- [58:48]
B
Right.
- [58:49]
A
There was no. Virtually no reflection. And anyone who made even a passing attempt at that conversation was ostracized from the entire party. So to me, that's a. That's like a fundamental critique, not just of Trump, but of the party itself, of the majority of the party. And I don't see how you get, as an intellectually honest. How one gets around that, as an intellectually honest person.
- [59:09]
B
I don't think most intellectually honest people are trying to get around it. What I hear a lot from the smart people on the right is just like, it's kind of just this acceptance. It's like the only way for us to get anything was through Trump. We didn't win any elections without Trump. The last guys didn't win. We don't win midterms without Trump. And in order to get whatever X Agenda item it is for me, that matters, you know, whether that's economic or some people, it's Israel or some people, it's free speech. Even though he's been terrible in free speech, you know, whatever it is, like Christian values. And I just, I accept that I need to have Trump in order to get that thing. And so I'm not going to challenge it or really question or even deal with it. And if you call me out and say that was not true, I'm just going to say I agree it's not true. But like, on balance, we got Trump, like there's that. I think the smartest people give a mostly a Machiavellian kind of defense of it. Right.
- [60:07]
A
And the interesting part about that is there's very little that Trump does where I agree with it, say that he doesn't then later become a hypocrite on the same issue. So, for instance, I was, I was very tough on Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police and all the associated policies that I think were terrible and led to increases in crime and were particularly bad for black communities. And Trump represented, however imperfectly, like a law and order defense of the police, at least rhetorically. And then he pardons people that beat up cops on January 6th. There's a million examples of that with the drug boat story we've been talking about. Okay, he's tough on drugs. Right. Except for that he pardons the leader of Honduras who was convicted in a not at all shady or partisan conviction and like a legitimate serious conviction. But I think like Republican appointed judge was oversaw that.
- [61:01]
B
Right.
- [61:02]
A
And for the very kinds of drug trafficking that he's now claiming to be tough on. And there's this remarkable shamelessness about the way in which he can just become a hypocrite on the issue that he used to, Stan. And very few people on the right will point it out.
- [61:20]
B
Yeah. And he has a little bit of a, he's Teflon on it, you know, and that's, that is worth acknowledging just as an analyst because, you know, but any one of those examples, if a Democrat showed that type of hypocrisy or that type of shamelessness, they would be mocked endlessly, obviously by the right wing media, but even by the mainstream media. And so I don't know, I think that shows his power. I think Obama had a little bit of that where he was able to, obviously he didn't do the type of stuff Trump did. He was able to get away with things because people had an affinity for him and the critiques didn't land. But yeah, I mean, I don't know what more to say. I agree. I concur. Trump gets away with a lot of bs.
- [62:05]
A
You recently had a conversation with Olivia Nosy who had a relationship with rfk and new salacious details of that have come out Recently. What'd you learn from that conversation? What's your view of that story?
- [62:17]
B
Yeah, look, I've known Olivia for a long time. I think that she's a super talented writer. I was trying to, in the conversation, understand. For me, I find RFK so unappealing in every way. It's like, how did this happen? How did you find yourself caught up in that? And I think that a lot of people were really, particularly in the media world, were following the story because of. Did you break journalistic rules by. There's the prurient element of this sleeping with somebody you're reporting on and writing on. And for me, that part was less interesting than the question of how did you become so enthralled to this person that has a lot of really dangerous ideas. It has maybe some good ideas on some things about the way our health system works, but some really horrific ideas when it comes to vaccines and the. And moving away from science, cutting NIH cuts, cutting research on a lot of things that could be life saving. How do you get enthralled with this person and really help run cover for him during the campaign while still being a journalist? I wanted to get to the answer to that question, and she just didn't want to go there. And I think that it doesn't seem like she's ready to kind of really grapple with that. And she agreed sort of passively with my assertion that he's not done a good job at hhs, but there was no real kind of depth of reflection on that part of it. Or maybe there has been, and she just wasn't ready to share it. At which point it's like, okay, well, you're on a media tour, so look, I've been in the fire before, and I believe people are redeemable and that I believe in redemption. And like I said, I think Olivia's talented. I wish that we had gotten the step. To get to redemption, though, you need real reflection and accountability. And in certain ways, it didn't feel like that was happening.
- [64:34]
A
Oh, it's possible she fell in love with him. And as to why she fell in love with him, that's anyone's guess.
- [64:40]
B
As a.
- [64:40]
A
As a wise man once said, women only want one thing and nobody knows what it is.
- [64:46]
B
So luckily, as a gay man, I don't have to. You know, it's. That's. That's on a nut I got to crack. Yeah. Yeah.
- [64:51]
A
That's not your department. Okay, so last question for you. What are your hopes for Democrats in the next. In the Next election cycle. Obviously, Gavin Newsom is being, you know, just recently, I think Ezra Klein did a whole article on how Gavin Newsom is now the clear front runner for the Democratic nomination, despite the fact that most people, I think most people worry about how he'll defend his record in California.
- [65:17]
B
Yeah.
- [65:18]
A
Including how he'll defend that to even a liberal audience. Like how. How can he defend San Francisco to a New Yorker, Even a liberal New Yorker. Yeah, it's going to be tough. But anyway, what do you think that, what do you think the Democrats should be thinking about right now? Who do you see that you're excited about, if anyone?
- [65:34]
B
Here's what I would want to see. I want to see some Democrats try some bold things and different things. The Democrats seem very stagnant. And I think that they're hoping, it feels like right now it's like this. We're in Groundhog Day. They're hoping once again that Trump being so terrible and unpopular will lead to them being able to win without really changing that much. And I just look back, I just mentioned them, the two most transformational politicians of my lifetime. I was a kid for Reagan, so I don't know. I can't really speak to. That is Obama and Trump. And both of them were just huge departures from what came before them. Obama runs just aggressively against the Iraq war. He's only been in office two years. He's making huge promises about what we could do differently as a society. And his middle name is Hussein. And he runs improbably against the existing machine of the Democratic Party and wins pretty easily. And then Trump is this outsider, kind of racist media apprentice reality show host. And he runs against Bush. He says it's Bush's fault for 9 11. He runs against the Iraq war. He runs against the Paul Ryanism and the cuts on Medicare and Social Security and entitlements. And then he runs to the right of the party on immigration and crime and a bunch of stuff, and myself included. I was like, this is crazy. This is not what Republicans are. They weren't going to vote for this. He wins in a landslide. And I just look at who in the Democratic Party do you look at for 2028? That's like, I'm going to try something different and I don't even care what. It doesn't have to appeal to me as a moderate necessarily. It's like somebody that's going to say, I'm going to run really left on economy and really right on immigration, or I'm going to run and be the peace candidate on foreign policy and really criticize the foreign policy establishment and also run as being very pro cop. You could imagine a bunch of different, something totally different. I'm just going to do run. My whole campaign is going to be about how I'm concerned about AI and we're going to go after the There are a bunch of stuff and what I see out there is a lot of very conventional kind of thinking among the Democrats. I think Zoran tried a bunch of different stuff in New York. We'll see if it actually works. But I think that the Democrats could learn from that. And there are a bunch of candidates that seem nice, seem like good people, seem like they'd be fine presidents. But I want to let them all try to impress the American public before I start picking a horse.
- [68:27]
A
All right, before I let you go, can you tell my listeners where to find your podcast?
- [68:30]
B
Of course, man. The Bulwark Podcast. Just search for it. We're on YouTube, the bulwark.com on substack and I appreciate you having me on, man. I'm trying to do more stuff outside of our little never Trumper bubble. And I appreciate you having me on to discuss.
- [68:47]
A
Nice. Yeah, it was a good conversation. Thanks, Tim.
- [68:49]
B
Thanks, guys. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited.
- [69:00]
A
To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means of half day.
- [69:11]
B
Yeah. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of network busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.