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- [00:03]
A
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Secret Podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark, here with my extremely good, wonderful friend, Sam Scott.
- [00:12]
B
Thank you.
- [00:14]
A
Who, I gotta say, I mean, I don't want to say no shade to jbl, but like, who is the man of my heart, obviously, but Sam is the man of geographical proximity. And so Sam and I spend a lot of time irl meet space time together. So, you know, I can't upgrade you to best friend because it's an insult to somebody else. I do love you very much.
- [00:38]
B
Thank you. Well, it's mutual. I appreciate that. But only because of geographic proximity. Otherwise, definitely not mutual.
- [00:45]
A
All right, Sam, so I did a full hour last night.
- [00:49]
B
Yeah, that's what we call a mitzvah in my religion. What you did, it was a good deed.
- [00:54]
A
Yep. And, and, and I paid the price. I paid the price of a bad night's sleep that comes with feeling such intense rage that late at night.
- [01:06]
B
But you scrolling a lot.
- [01:08]
A
Yeah, I, you know, well, so part of it, I really. So my point is that I talked a lot about it. I gave my Insta reacts, my hot takes. And so I really want to hear from you, especially because you were doing a great job in our office slack of grabbing the documents that Trump was, you know, relying on for this weird case he was making. And you were doing some sense making out of it. Because for me, the thing that was hardest about watching that speech, I was watching it with Sonny and I was, you know, kept putting things in the slack saying, what is he talking about? Like, I, like it was just like it was literally incomprehensible. Usually I can follow words in English and understand their meaning, but I was sitting there, I was texting Sonny, I was like, did Venezuela hack us? Did we hack Venezuela? Did Venezuela hack itself? What is he talking about? And so anyway, what did you make of the speech?
- [02:04]
B
Well, it started off interesting because it wasn't about election interference or influencing early on. It was about everything else. I think at one point he said there was transgender for everyone in the country prior to his election, which I thought was an interesting way to describe what was happen gender for everyone.
- [02:23]
A
But haven't you heard this, like, to
- [02:24]
B
me, like a buffet where you could just get transgender.
- [02:27]
A
He says that every single speech.
- [02:29]
B
I know, but does he have to like, go through the checklist, like a little wind up?
- [02:33]
A
He does like a stump speech because he did this. I try, I was trying to remember, and I probably should have thought about it subsequently, but I was trying to remember he did this last time. He was doing a kind of important speech and we were all waiting to hear something. Maybe it was the State of the Union where we were on or around something where we were waiting for important information that as citizens of this country we might need from our president. And he does a first 10 minutes of transgender for everyone. We're the hottest country. We were down, but now we're back. Sleepy Joe Biden did this or that. So, yeah, you're right at that beginning, I was like, oh no, is he just going to do this? And we're not actually going to get any information.
- [03:18]
B
We'll, we'll talk about this later. But we had a little, not a real bet, but like sort of an internal office bet about which words he'd utter. There's a story about his teleprompter operator betting on the speech content and.
- [03:32]
A
Oh yeah, it's our last, our last topic.
- [03:34]
B
Yeah, we'll get to it later. But this, this explains why the guys in, in this room over here who watch every Trump speech could properly predict the words he's going to use. Anyways, on the content of the speech, there's a couple things, like on the factual stuff. So I did go through all the documents just to unpack, like the nitty gritty he said obviously stuff that was deeply misleading. And then you look at the documents and you get a sense of what the true story is. So just a couple examples. China has hacked 200 million voter file, voter database or voter information. Basically, if you looked at the actual documents. What, what he really meant was that China purch a lot of publicly available information on donors. Anyone can buy it from the states. They have voter files. They're accessible for people to purchase. And China did that, which is not nefarious.
- [04:25]
A
We do this too. So there's like companies that are data brokers for this stuff because you do something where you match a voter file. So let's say you're in the business that I've always been in of persuasion and you want to know, okay, who are my persuadable voters in swing states? And like, what's their profile? College educated, whatever. And then you can purchase the available voter file and you can try to match them so that you can target the right people. Like this is a. Basically, it is a common practice of anyone who wants to engage in public persuasion efforts around elections, which is legal. However, it is foreign interference.
- [05:11]
B
Sure, I'm sure it's foreign influence. There's a difference between interference and influence. Yeah. So China, so they had a document from the CIA in. In this tranche of files that they released which talked about what China was actually doing. And the main conclusion was they were trying to influence policy vis a vis the elections, but also vis a vis lobbying. And there was a conclusion that in 2018 or so China was going, was targeting swing state lawmakers up for election that cycle precisely because they wanted to influence tariff policy that Trump had put into place in his first term, which is foreign influence. It happens. You don't have to like it, but it this happen. So that was one. The other thing was Venezuela and whether they were fussing around with our vote electronic voting machines. The conclusion from the actual documents is that Venezuela possessed the. The government of Venezuela possessed the ability to hack their own voting machines, and we use similar technology, but Venezuela had not hacked our voting machines. So again, it's like one of these bait and switches. There was also a question about whether non citizens were voting. They put up some statistic about like 250,000. If you looked at the actual data, it's not clear where they got that from. It appears that they were also count non citizens on the voting rolls, which could be false positives, as in someone's name that matches actually a registered voter with people who were dead and still in the voting rolls. Again, it's sort of a misleading statistic. But what really struck me about the speech and what I wrote about for morning shots just went live is if you actually sort of chisel down to what these documents show, the actual primary documentation that was released. If you chisel down and you read it and then you compare it to what Trump himself was saying, you can't escape the conclusion that as far as threats go to the integrity of elections in the United States of America, the biggest threat is Donald Trump. Yeah, he's the biggest threat. I'm going to read you a paragraph. Okay. Just close your eyes and think about. Don't really close your eyes.
- [07:15]
A
I was prepared to close my eyes.
- [07:16]
B
You can if you want to. Who am I describing here? This is. I'm just gonna read. We assess that adversaries could also make false claims about their ability to manipulate US Election infrastructure as part of a broader effort to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic processes. Much of the voting public probably knows little about the process of administering US Elections, which could allow false narratives to gain traction that would describe precisely what Donald Trump is doing. Now, this was a January 2020 National Intelligence Commission report about the vulnerabilities of our election. But what they're really describing is people who are adversarial to the United States, trying to sow discord and undermine confidence in our ability to administer elections. And as I watched Trump last night, and as I watched Trump over the past 10 years, that's precisely what he is doing. He is the threat. And he's doing it under the guise of saying, well, we have all these other threats, right?
- [08:24]
A
Which is his go to move. Right. Every, every statement is an admission or projection. I said this on the live last night and I don't know that I changed my mind that much this morning. On one hand, the level of alarm that I feel about the 2026 election and Trump's desperation to do something to try and ensure that Democrats do not ultimately have oversight over him, right. He the reason, if you look at, if you look back at redistricting and why Trump decided to encourage Texas to do mid cycle redistricting, it was about, all right, guys, where can we pick up any seats by squeezing out additional seats in some of these states, right? And then they went and put a ton of pressure on, you might remember Indiana and everywhere else. And so Democrats then had to fight back. But ultimately in, because of the way that the courts came down, ultimately Republicans did pick up a bunch of seats like they will, they will save themselves a bunch of seats through the redistricting. Okay? So they've already made gains there. Still, it looks like Democrats could take the House if the environment is the way it's been looking. And so their next move is to try to figure out, okay, how do we undermine the results of the election if Democrats do win either in the Senate or the House, and this is how he's going to do it. And his everybody, the reporting says that his staff or whatever people didn't want him to give this speech, right. They're like, this is a mistake. Now, I don't know whether they think it's a mistake for political purposes or because they actually the the severity of what he was doing there, which is to say, like our elections are not secure, don't believe in them because it backfired on him last time he did that. Backfired in Georgia.
- [10:21]
B
You should explain why.
- [10:23]
A
Well, backfired because he told everybody they're rigged. And so people are like, well, if they're rigged, why bother, right? Which I think that there is though there is at least in a corner of the right a, you know, it's got to be too big to rig. Like we've gotta show up. And so I do think that there's people in the maga Right. That think it is a motivational tool. I think that's wrong and it's going to backfire. But anyway, this was about the 2026 election. That is dangerous. On the other hand, on the other hand I did feel sort of relief that this was sort of just more bluster and nonsense. Like there's not a single thing in there. So sometimes you worry that he's going to find like a toehold on something like some way that he could actually where you got to be like, okay, he's got a, there's a kernel of truth to this that they're going to build this narrative off of. It's not going to be entirely true, but there's going to be something, nothing, nothing. The whole thing was smoking opposite.
- [11:22]
B
I don't know, maybe I would like to believe you, but I think this is chapter three of 20. Right. I think that. So the question is, why give this speech now? Some of these documents were declassified a couple weeks ago, at least according to the markings on the documents, or even months ago really. So why do this now? And either he was exceedingly bored and felt like he had to give a primetime address, which is, you know, with Trump that could very well be the
- [11:53]
A
reason, as plausible as anything, or he
- [11:56]
B
could be laying the predicate for one of two things I think. One is pre election chicanery, which is, you know, hey, we have real problems. I allied them in my July speech. Nothing's been done by the states to fix them. Er, go, I have to, you know, we're going to have to do a national emergency. The feds are going to have to come in and take over these voting locations and the courts, you know, if they stop me, we'll challenge that. And, and it's just a mess. That's one. Two is post election chicanery which is, well, vote happened. But we didn't do any of the fixes that I, I said we need to do and we really need to investigate all this stuff before we can properly seat these people because there's a lot of close elections here in, in, in districts that have non citizens voting. According to the data I have, we can't seek these people. And there's nothing, I mean he got away with that type of chicanery in, in 2020. Right. Like, I mean that, yeah, he left office but he survived politically and came back. There's, and there's nothing to me that suggests there's a willingness of Republicans on the Hill to say actually no, that's right. If anything, I'm like a little bit like, alarmed at how widely accepted this now is. Right. So also my piece, I was like noting that just this week you had, hours before the speech, you had Tommy Tuberville, not the, not the brightest senator up there, but he was like, yeah, there's four or five of my colleagues who are illegitimate. I mean, illegitimate. What is he talking about? No evidence. Just said it out loud. They shouldn't be here. And then you had Jay Clayton, who's supposed to be the sane version of the dni, not Bill Pulte, who couldn't bring himself to say that Joe Biden was the rightful winner of the election. I mean, these aren't like minor figures now. These are senators and these are, you know, the reasonable choice for dni. There is not really any backstop here. And that's what makes me really nervous. So, yeah, maybe he's just getting, he's, he's scratching that itch. But I just think this is going to be part, one of a multi, part process heading into November.
- [13:54]
A
Yeah. So I, I completely agree with that. And sorry, don't mistake, don't mistake what I'm saying for the idea that I didn't. Wasn't enormously alarmed by that last night. I was. My point is, the thing that I was relieved about was there was nothing there. There wasn't, you know, my, like, from a narrative standpoint. And this is his big pitch, and I should have mentioned this is one of the steps that Trump has been trying to take to influence the election is to pass the SAVE Act. Right. He's got this sort of bananas piece of legislation that despite having a majority, despite having Republicans who we're fine to, you know, say yes to Cash Patel and RFK and every other insane thing that Trump has wanted to do, they're still not passing the SAVE Act. He doesn't have the votes for it because it's an insane piece of legislation. There's like, some things in there that I think are reasonable, but for the, but overall, it contains so much weird stuff that people aren't voting for it. So I was also like, okay, he's trying to pitch the Save act through all of this, but there is no doubt in my mind. I agree we are underreacting to what is a slow motion but very clear and obvious methodical attempt to mess with the election in some way, whether it is setting a predicate for why it has to be nationalized and, you know, declare a national emergency, like you said, or whether it's just about sewing doubt or whether it's about tying it up in court so he can last as long as possible without oversight. Because the thing that he is dreading, the thing that he doesn't want is. And none of his. And the reason that I think the Republicans do go along with it is they're all on the take right now. Every single one of them is vulnerable. The second that Democrats have the gavel and they have to go testify under oath. Like, it's been this smash and grab job where they are looting the government and they just think they're all like, yolo. How long can we keep this going before somebody actually looks at what we're doing? And hopefully Trump will just pardon us all at that point.
- [16:04]
B
I think that's right. I do think that's right. And every day is like a new revelation of just pure corruption. And I think they kind of recognize that the grift comes to a bit of a halt, but more than that, that there's a little bit of accountability. I mean, I don't know if we're talking about this later, but the story yesterday about how, like, Truth Social is going to kind of offer early access to Trump's post to, like.
- [16:28]
A
Can you talk about this for a second? Because this is, it's so incredible.
- [16:33]
B
I mean, so basically, Truth Social, Trump's property, where he posts, because he's, I don't know, still mad at Twitter, and he won't go back on Twitter anyways. It's a big money loser. Like, they move, they lose insane amounts of money even though they have an incredibly high valuation. And so they got to figure out ways to make cash. And I guess they came up with this idea that you can buy early access to Trump's posts, as in, before they go up to the universe for some price, which would in turn give you the ability to get ahead of market trends, because obviously the markets react to everything that Trump posts because he's the president and sets policy. And so basically, it's monetizing the idea of kind of insider trading. Like, you know, already some people know what Trump's about to post, and clearly they've been taking advantage of it by placing strategic bets. It's very evident from, from the data already. But now they can make money off of that early information. They, being the Trump family, can make money off of that early knowledge by just charging for it. And it's like, I, I mean, it's unprecedented levels of corruption. I, I thought back, I always think back to, like, the Lincoln Bedroom scandal where, you know, Bill Clinton gave donors access to Lincoln Bedroom. So you paid money or he donated to the, you know, committees that related to Clinton. You got access to president. This is just getting access not just to Trump's thoughts, but the ability to move your own money around and make money off of Trump's thoughts before anyone else. It's truly mind boggling.
- [18:03]
A
I'm going to play JVL here for a second.
- [18:05]
B
Sure.
- [18:07]
A
Sam, what are we going to do about the fact that like nothing is happening in the face of these things? Like I, I thought you're gonna say
- [18:17]
B
the people wanted this. No, no, no, people voted for this.
- [18:21]
A
No, I think JBL likes to ask sort of these big questions that I, I should just stop because like I always go to, okay, I need a real answer for this. Maximalist. But, or like, but, but, but this
- [18:32]
B
is, what do you do? I don't know.
- [18:33]
A
But this is one of those things where it's like, how do you recover? Like, he's, he's, he's. These are one of the things where jbl I think really is right to sort of zero in on this stuff is what do you do in the future after this trust has been lost? Like once you have normalized insider trading off of the presidency, where the presidency is like, it's not that somebody's doing it to them, they're like, oh, here's insider trading for you. Pay me for insider information and you can make money off of it. What's to what? And then nobody does anything about it. Like can't. Is there's, there not a rule? Like, is this legal? How is this possible?
- [19:11]
B
I don't know. I mean, I'm assuming there are rules around this and I'm assuming there's it's either illegal or very close to the line of illegality. Right. And yet of course the regulators are all controlled by Trump. And not only that, there's, you know, efforts to immunize Trump and that's been upheld by the courts. And beyond that it's not, I mean it's almost a given that before he leaves office he'll do a pardon of anyone and everyone. A pre pardon, partly because Joe Biden frankly gave the predicate for it, which was, you know, he was pre prepared in a lot of people because he was worried about prosecutions and Trump will do the same and they'll just point to Biden and say, yeah, he did it, so I can do it too. So it's like one of these things that's both maddening because it's so corrupt and then maddening because there's just no apparent way at this point to say, wow, they should have, like, they should be able to account for that. I don't know how you get, how do you put that genie back in the bottle? It's impossible to imagine.
- [20:06]
A
So I'm just going to get one thing off my chest. I said a version of this last night, but this is the kind of thing that settles into me more and more is, you know, we all spent the last couple of months in a good faith struggle session over Graham Platner. And, you know, your Eric Erickson's and your Republicans were having this, like, field day over, like, CCC Democrats. They endorse a literal Nazi. And, and I, I, I think about on nights like last night, why it's very important that you never take any of them seriously. That like, we, we should, people of good faith should, should demand that the people who are running for office, you know, have, be of civic virtue or, like, we should want that and we should, you know, we should not want people. And the Democrats did the right thing, as they often do at the very last minute. But Republicans who tolerate this, which is more or less all of them, like, I'm not seeing an outcry from Republicans from last night. In fact, you mentioned Tuberville, but, you know. Yeah. Bernie Moreno, who before the speech said, I was just briefed by the White House on what to expect this evening. I would encourage every American to tune in tonight to the President's speech. This may be the most important Oval Office address since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Time for complacency with China is over. Like, they sent out a bunch of their Republican stooges to the Cuban Missile crisis.
- [21:38]
B
Yeah.
- [21:38]
A
To say, like, how important this was, how essential. Like, when I talk about first order concerns that, like, this isn't about policy. It's not even to me like, it is about character. Obviously Trump's character is bad character, but it is about this destruction of the fabric of American liberal democracy. And I know that sounds sort of boring or like, I don't know, political science or whatever, but, like, this is what's happening. It is not. None of these small bespoke things are bigger than this. And the fact that Republicans, I mean, tolerate it, endorse it, like Eric Erickson. No, but no, they are, they don't have a leg to stand on to lecture anybody for sure. Also, they are bad to just, like, it is wrong to not speak out about this. It is wrong to not have your hair on fire about this. People are underreacting to the way that Donald Trump is behaving and anybody, I get, like, I am just shocked every day by the people like Eric Erickson, who said after the 2020 election, where Donald Trump did the election lies, fomented an attack on the Capitol, tried to overturn the results. He was like, all right, I'm in now. I'm in for 2024. And now people are quiet while he does this, while he lies like this, while he undermines everything we do here as a country. It's shocking. It should shock the conscience.
- [23:00]
B
Yeah. And we've talked about the hack gap before, but this is like the essence of it. And so, you know, last night, for instance, it didn't take much to click through to those documents. Like you said, I was doing it in real time. And like, pretty early on, you could find stuff that just sort of completely blew up the narrative. The thing we haven't really talked about here was these documents that this White House just released last night. A big thrust of it was how Russia really did interfere in 2020 and how they were like, trying to cook up all this stuff on Biden and that they were the real, actual malignant actor here and doing all this influence stuff. So, like, it was an affirmation of, of everything that Trump had, you know, railed against. And like, you know, the hat gap allows them to just ignore that and focus on the speech. Right. It allows them to just act like Trump's revelations are gospel when the documents that he himself undercut them. And then there's the other version of the hat gap, which is to sort of play footsie towards concerns about Trump. So occasionally you'll get a post that's like, man, you know, this self dealing is really not great. And we shouldn't, we should call it out more because of, you know, we were, we were harsh on Hunter Biden, his paintings or some version of that. And then like a week later it's like, but the Democrats are just so much worse. And so therefore, and it's like, you know, there is not ultimately the, the sort of defining principle, the thing that really animates them is tribal loyalty. And that's the hat gap, is that they are driven by trial tribal loyalty. I'm not saying Democrats aren't, but more often than Republicans, I do believe Democratic commentators are willing to veer off and just say, nah, don't think so, not going to handle it, not going to stomach it. Usually it's at the last minute. But you do see that.
- [24:49]
A
Yeah, but I don't know. I remember lots of Democrats condemning Biden's pardoning of Hunter Biden, like, they were. They were ashamed that he'd done that in many cases. Not a lot of the voters, I think, were kind of with him on it, Democratic voters. But I think that the Democratic sort of pundit class. And also there was a lot more of us willing to talk about that Joe Biden was too old. I certainly talked about how the voters thought he was too old. And I. Anyway, I just. I don't think the two sides are not the same, and the damage being done is not the same.
- [25:23]
B
Well, that's my biggest concern, is that we talk a lot about this, but it is worth hitting against. Like, the normalization of all this. Right. It's now going to become just sort of part of the process, that if a Democrat wins a close election, that election will be illegitimate for Republicans. It just will be. And so you can't fix a system like that. Right. Like, because we've normalized that system, there's no fix. Because ultimately, the only acceptable outcome for that part of the country is if their side wins. There's nothing wrong with the administration of the election. It's just the result of the election that determines its legitimacy. And if you get to a place like that, it's really hard to go back. You just. How do you convince people that actually, no, everything is largely good in our election infrastructure? Sure, there are problems here and there, but, like, we can fix those with actual reforms. And I just. That that's what really worries me is that we've. It's. It's like it used to be, debate back and forth. But when you're starting to really question the fundamental institutions, the way we go about doing elections, it's hard to see how you repair that.
- [26:33]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And remember Chris Krebs after 2020, who was the head of CISA at the time, said that the election was not rigged. It was a incredibly secure election. And so Trump fired him. Fired him. All right, I want to talk about J.D. vance's cringe interview with Rogan. I got some focus group stuff about Vance that I think is fun that you'll like. So we can. We can lighten up here just a little bit. And I also want to talk about Planche, but we're gonna have to do it on the other side, guys. We don't pay wall very much at the Bulwark. This is one of the few conversations that gets paywalled, and you should come join us. You know why? We know who the bad guys are, and we will never not tell you the truth about what we think about who the bad guys are. Oh, and it's Trump. Trump's the bad guy and all the people who are letting him get away with this. All right, so come, come join us. Subscribe. We'll see you guys on the other side.