← The Opinions
The Opinions
Republicans Are Quietly Pushing Back Against Trump
00:38:08
Will the president soon wish he hadn’t run for a second term?
Loading summary
Transcript101 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is Nick Kristof. I'm an opinion columnist for the New York Times, and I'm proud that for more than 100 years, the Times has conducted an annual appeal to raise money for charitable organizations. Times journalism is fundamentally about vetting the truth, and in this case, about vetting organizations and selecting some of the best to help create opportunity and overcome hardship. I hope you'll consider donating to the New York Times Communities Fund. To learn more, go to nytimes.com NYTfund thank you.
- [00:35]
B
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news, here's what to make of it.
- [00:52]
I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And as us I am joined by my fantastic colleagues, the columnist Jamelle Bouie and David French. Guys, welcome.
- [01:06]
C
Hello. Hello.
- [01:06]
A
Hello, Michelle.
- [01:07]
B
You're both in my town this week. How's D.C. treating you? Have you popped down to the White House yet to check out Melania's infamous Christmas decor?
- [01:17]
A
I mean, Michelle, when am I not in the White House? I mean, really, like.
- [01:21]
B
I mean, you are a man of the Trump era.
- [01:24]
A
I just walk in, I walk into D.C. and they're just there with open arms. So the gold is beautiful.
- [01:30]
B
They rolled out the gold carpet for you.
- [01:32]
A
Well, I would only say the problem is not enough gold.
- [01:35]
B
Too little gold.
- [01:36]
C
Okay, note, I don't know anything about this Christmas display. I have not paid a lick of attention to it.
- [01:41]
B
Well, Melania every year has put up some vaguely disturbing. One year it was blood red trees. One year it was the White Witch of Narnia with everything kind of dead and crystally. So. I always look forward to what she's doing. It's.
- [01:56]
C
I kind of admire that. I admire her being weird about Christmas.
- [02:02]
B
Well, there you go. Jamel is firmly on the let's get weird about Christmas train. All right, so let's get down to it. This week, in addition to Christmas, we're talking about the President's popularity among the American people, but also specifically within his own party. So I wanna start with this week's special election for the house in Tennessee's 7th district. David, it's right in your backyar. Last year, as you know, Trump easily won it by more than 20 points. But then earlier this week, the GOP candidate won by just nine. And this was after the party sank millions into shoring him up. What does this tell you about what's going on? Like it's being seen. Even though. Even though the Democrats Lost. It's being seen as a very bad sign for the president and his party.
- [02:55]
A
Yeah, for good reason. But before we start, let me establish my Tennessee 7 street cred here for a minute.
- [03:00]
B
Please do.
- [03:01]
A
Okay, so that's my old district. It was my district until late May of this year. So this is where I spent a lot of time.
- [03:11]
My sister in law was the campaign manager for the current Republican mayor in the town, Franklin, that is part of that district. My brother in law is the chairman of the school board in Williamson county, which is a big part of the district is Williamson County. I've been lived, living, eating, breathing, these sort of local politics for a while now. And I think here's a good way to understand what's going on. What you're looking at is the beginning of the fragmentation of the GOP after the Trump era.
- [03:42]
B
So.
- [03:42]
A
And what a lot of people don't realize is that a lot of communities around America have, are more divided than you think based on the presidential numbers. So if you look at the presidential numbers, that district, overwhelmingly Republican, loves them. Some Donald Trump. So plus 22, I believe in 2024 for Trump. And I think if you had Trump on there on the ballot right now, it would still be close to that. At this point, supporting Trump is just a matter of identity for a lot of Republicans. It's, it's beyond sort of normal political debate. But if you lift up the rock here, you will know that in Tennessee 7, there have been vicious Republican on Republican fights for years. And really the fight is between the more establishment, what you might call Reagan, Bush wing of the party, and the new insurgent part of the party. And those two factions don't get along locally at all. So Moms for Liberty, for example, when it was trying to ban the book Ruby Bridges Goes to School from the elementary school curriculum, a lot of the people who resisted that were Republicans. When Moms for Liberty had a big slate of candidates that it was running in local elections, and when you had more radical candidates running for, say, mayor, you had big intense fights. And these were not between Democrats and Republicans. There's not a ton of Democrats there. I mean, my neighborhood was 85% Republican.
- [05:16]
B
It was gerrymandered last go around, right?
- [05:19]
A
Oh, totally. And so what you're seeing, I think, is the beginning of the division of the Republican Party post Trump. Now you're getting into, I don't like these MAGA guys. I'm tired of this. And I think that that's one of the real stories going forward.
- [05:37]
B
Jamal, what do you Think as far.
- [05:40]
C
As the election results go.
- [05:42]
Two things really strike me. The first is just the swing, right? Like a 13 point swing for a special election. That's like, that's, that's striking. And what's even more interesting is that it's more or less the exact same swing that happened in New Jersey and Virginia as well. Of course, because those are Democratic leaning states. It resulted in big Democratic wins. But having the same swing in kind of a suburban district in a very different political environment suggests that that actually just might be where the nation is right now, a 13 point swing away from Republicans, especially in suburban areas. And I'll say the Republican Party nationally is basically being sustained by overwhelming dominance in rural areas and then being able to win majorities in conservative suburbs. But if the second part of that equation begins to deteriorate, then it's big trouble everywhere. At the end of the day, most Americans live in suburbs. It's just a numbers game and you really cannot sustain a big national majority. And so if I were looking at this from a 30,000 foot viewpoint, that is the thing that would really keeping me up at night. If I were Republican strategists, like, what's going on in these suburbs? And are Democrats simply mobilizing more voters or was this some persuasion? Right. Is this some people switching sides? And the fact that turnout appears to be about 90% of the 2022 midterm turnout, which is insane, like typically special election turnout is among the lowest turnout you can get. That's why they're not particularly representative of future trends. But if you're getting general election esque number in a special election and then you're getting a 13 point swing on top of that, then that does suggest a good amount of persuasion happening. That people who voted for Republicans in the last, in the 2022 cycle voted for the Democrat in this special election cycle. And that, you know.
- [07:40]
If it's like a big national swing and then there's persuasion happening as well. Persuasion, just general term for, you know, people switching sides, then that's, you know, that's like early retirement. That's like if I'm a Republican lawmaker, it's like I'm gonna after Christmas announce that I intend to spend more time with my family.
- [07:59]
B
It will be interesting to see what kind of retirement announcements we get. That always kicks up after they've gone home and spent some time. But one of the things that I am interested in as well is if you're talking about like a 13 point swing, this could make life very interesting. In those places that Donald Trump been pushing to redistrict. So then we get into lots of dummy mandering. If you're talking about a big swing, what starts out looking like you're rigging things for your team could wind up meaning that you've actually rigged yourself out of some seats. Because if you're looking at a really big swing, you know, the way they gerrymander is they take these safe seats and they shuffle things around so that you still have a red district, but it's not quite as red. So, you know, maybe Instead of being plus 10 Republican, it shrinks down to plus 4 Republican. But if you've got a big national swing, then you could lose some of those seats, which I think would be really just kind of magic karma. That would be sweet.
- [09:03]
C
The other thing I'll say is that in a lot of these gerrymander districts, you have lawmakers that just aren't used to competitive elections. Competitive partisan elections. Right. So it's like if you've been coasting along in a gerrymandered district and you all of a sudd have someone like out for blood on the other side, right. Someone really hungry and you're lazy and the winds are against you as well, then it's like you're in a bad place.
- [09:25]
A
Well, I'm glad you said that, Jamel, because if you look at the dynamics in the race in Tennessee Afton being the Democratic candidate, she worked hard. She worked really hard. So she leaned into the race. And I think that that's one of the things that led to this sudden alarm from the national Republican Party that, wait, what? This, this race could be close. And then, trust me, they poured in.
- [09:51]
B
The resources, money came in on both sides.
- [09:53]
C
I mean, like three and a half, like three and a half million dollars.
- [09:56]
A
I think for the Republican candidates, it was unreal. I mean, my phone, I'm still on all these, you know, text. Donald Trump personally texted me multiple times, urging me, yes, I felt, yeah, absolutely. But the other thing is that's very, I think, ominous for Republicans here is that they were down 13 points running against a left wing Democrat. This is somebody who's called locally the AOC of Tennessee.
- [10:21]
B
Yeah, that's not a good, that's not a compliment in Tennessee for this.
- [10:25]
A
That's not a match. She wasn't a match for the district. So what happens if you have Democratic candidates who are closer matches for the district? Does that eke out another 4 to 5%? Maybe?
- [10:36]
C
Yeah, we'll see if the Democratic Party is, which is A big ask. Thinking strategically next time around, find someone who's a better fit for the district, actively recruit and run again. You kind of just soften the ground for a potential flip in the next.
- [10:51]
B
Cycle so they can play everywhere next.
- [10:55]
C
I'm a big believer in this thing of it's actually important to lose in ways that lay the ground for future wins. You're not going to win all the time, but you can. But running good campaigns on a regular basis builds up an infrastructure. It builds up familiarity and creates the conditions for, oh, maybe I can win in this next thing.
- [11:16]
B
So what we're looking at now is a loss that nonetheless a Democratic loss that nonetheless has the Republican Party, especially those in Congress, super nervous. And when that happens, people start assessing, well, what do I need to do to survive next year during the midterms, Trump's not gonna be on the ballot. Trump's popularity is in the toilet. A lot of things not really going his way. How much do I start need needing to distance myself from him? So we've been seeing some splits, like most notably this boat strike kerfuffle this week has prompted not one, but both chambers of Congress to announce investig with the Armed Services Committees. You know, the chairman on those committees saying, we gotta get to the bottom of this. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, is taking a lot of heat on this. And I wanna know how you guys think about this. I mean, how serious a problem is this, either the individual issue or just kind of what it portends?
- [12:28]
A
You know, I would say if you're looking at this, there are a couple of factors here. One is if you are a Republican for 10 years now, the main, and especially a Republican member of the House, the main threat to your career has been the disapproval of Donald Trump. But if you have a situation where they're looking at potentially a 12 to 15 to 18 point group swing in the Democratic direction, then all of a sudden you get to numbers like 50, 60, 70, 80 Republicans who the primary threat to their career now begins to shift to become the general election voter. And if the general election voter is the primary threat to their career, then you're going to see more people standing up because now their career is at stake in a different way. And it's not that now they may have reacted. They'll cast it as, I am outraged morally, they'll cast it in these moral and strategic terms. But for many of them, it's just the career calculus is shifting.
- [13:36]
B
So, Jamel, kind of, how have you been viewing this boat strike dust up. Which, for those who may not paid attention, Trump has been. The Trump administration has been blowing up boats in the Caribbean, saying that they are running drugs, which, you know, this is not necessarily an unpopular move with a lot of his voters. But there is one episode where there was a second strike that may or may not have been ordered on some survivors, which may or may not constitute a war crime. And so that's what's got everybody completely up in arms. So what have you been looking at in particular with all this, Jamel?
- [14:21]
C
So I want to say real quick, just on the substance of all of this, that this is reprehensible. I'm laughing. But we're not at war with Venezuela, right? We're not at war with Venezuela. There's none of that. The administration provided no evidence that these boats are trafficking drugs and these boats are in international waters, Right? So, like, the administration presents it as we're destroying terrorists, but take away their spin. What's actually happening is the US Navy, under orders from the President, is blowing up random boats in the Caribbean and saying, oh, they're terrorists. Which at a broad scale, you know.
- [15:03]
Even under the most expansive vision of the unitary Executive, Article 2 does not grant the president the right to make a unilateral designation that someone is a terrorist and to be murdered, murdered by the state. Right. That, that, that's not a power the president has. So, like, I've even. I, I've, I've. I'm sorry, I'm. I'm getting animated.
- [15:22]
B
I feel like I like the passion. I like it go.
- [15:25]
C
I am at this point right now where I won't even describe these as potential war crimes. This is criminal murder. Like, if you are in this, this alleged double tap, if it is the case, right, that we did an illegal strike, first of all, and blew up this boat and who have no idea who these people were. They could have just been innocent fishermen. And then there is a second strike at two survivors, which is a no, no.
- [15:50]
B
David, you're the expert. Total no, no.
- [15:52]
C
I mean, like, you. I mean, all respect to David, and I will defer to his expertise, but I'll say this has been a no, no since there's been war, right? Like, this is, this is like if you go back to antiquity, you'll have people observing. You can't do that, right? Like, it's recognized as, like, a part of human civilization, that if there are survivors floating in the water, you have an obligation to at least not kill them. I just watched the second Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. And in that film, one of the inciting incidents by the villain is exactly this. The villain has his soldiers blow up a ship and then kill the survivors. And it's a huge international incident in the world of the film, as it should be. And so I just.
- [16:44]
I just, I really want to say how absolutely morally reprehensible this is. And if it is the case that Pete Hegseth ordered that second strike, that in my view, he should be arrested and held criminally liable for homicide, because that's what it is.
- [17:04]
B
So my suspicion, so my suspicion is that there were plenty of Republicans who were very squidgy about this, but they were still kind of going along again. You don't wanna get Trump upset with you. And this just gives them an opportunity. Combined with all of the other softening of his popularity and getting their clocks cleaned in the November elections, this is just their opportunity to separate themselves from something they were really unhappy about anyway.
- [17:35]
C
And I think your suggestion, Michelle, that if Trump were not this, like, if this were February of this year, you might not have so much speaking up. It'd be much more maybe behind the scenes, like, I don't know, we should be doing this, but the fact that polls are consistently showing Trump in the mid-30s to the very low-40s.
- [17:55]
Yeah, it's sort of like this guy. For comparison's sake, when George W. Bush left office in 2009, his approval was about 33%. So Trump right now is in late stage W territory.
- [18:08]
B
Well, this is one of the things I'm thinking about in general. I think the calendar has come into play here. He is a second term president, he is a lame duck. And you combine that with his kind of sliding popularity, he's underwater on pretty much all the issues, even immigration, which he was doing pretty well for a while there. That was kind of the last thing to go. And then they had that very upsetting kind of off year November election that is always seen as a referendum on the president. So, yeah, if we were back in February, or if he were popular or if he were not a second term president, all of those things could make a difference. But because we are where we are, I think he is entering a phase that's just gonna be increasingly frustrating for him because there is on balance going to be more and impetus for Republican lawmakers to try and separate themselves.
- [19:10]
A
So, and it is telling to me that in all of this, 99% of the heat is being aimed at Hegseth and not Trump. And so we're still in this dynamic where the permission structure allows Republicans to fight each other one layer below Trump, but still not really about Trump. But just to Jamel's point, and I'm very glad that Jamel interjected and brought this point in, and you're very kind to say that I have expertise, but I will say that expertise here is not necessary in the slightest. Just literacy. Literacy. Okay, so let me read from page 1088 of the Department of Defense law of war manual.
- [19:52]
B
Oh, I love it when you get the war manual out.
- [19:54]
A
Oh, who doesn't love that? I just carry it with me to.
- [19:57]
B
Parties because people are fun at parties.
- [20:00]
A
Oh, I'm. I'm the best. So the requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows in fact are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal. What are we doing here? That's just black and white stuff right there. And I agree with everything that Jamel said about the underlying legality of the actual strikes themselves. There's no congressional authorization. There's no act of war. Crime is not war. Suspected criminals are not terrorists. And if you want to see the absurdity of it all, you know, you'll see that the administration is saying, well, the second strike was fine because these terrorists or these drug run, whatever were, quote, still in the fight.
- [20:58]
B
What fight? Click into a boat. What?
- [21:00]
A
What. What fight? You know, and it's interesting how you can see how this just doesn't fit within the war paradigm. So, for example, if you are in war at the high seas and a ship is burning, you can keep firing on that ship until it ceases fire or it strikes its colors. So this is designed for navy on Navy combat. What's the equivalent here? I mean, the speedboat is going down the. And then all of a sudden it blows up. Is one of the surviving members of the crew supposed to say, strike the colors, lads.
- [21:35]
The Navy has bested us? No. What are we doing here? Right? And so this is being treated with summary executions that we would call murder in America. Right? If you're in America and you see somebody running away and you think that they have drugs, you can't gun them down. You can't even gun them down if you know they have drugs, Right? And traditionally, we have used the Coast Guard, we have used military assets for drug interdiction in the past. But you know what we do? We stop, we search and we arrest. And then we prosecute. And guess what? That's better. That's better than just blowing people up because you can't question a dead person. Right, Right.
- [22:17]
B
I want to expand this back beyond just the boat strike incident to he, you know, President Trump is taking an awful lot of heat over his Ukraine peace plan. People have gotten, you know, from his congressional team. People are pushing back on that. The Jeffrey Epstein mess was an abject disaster for him. You know, there are a few cracks that he can't quite control. You know, like Mike Johnson had to tell the White House, the Speaker had to tell the White House that the president's idea for, you know, expanding Obamacare subsidies was not playing in the House. People are starting to say, no, I don't think I'm just gonna go along immediately. We're gonna fight this out a little more. And I do think that while you'll see it targeted at one level below Trump, resisting Trump's will or complaining about Trump's policies is gonna become a more common thing. And I don't think that it helps that there's this sense that Trump, in addition to being a lame duck, is also slipping. I mean, there've been another story about how he keeps falling asleep during the Oval Office meetings, things like that. I think once people start smelling blood in the water or, you know, little virility slippage, that just is gonna accelerate this whole process.
- [23:50]
C
I'll also say presidents, capable presidents, not necessarily good ones, just capable ones, can respond to events, they can make course adjustments to try to recover their public standing because they recognize that they need public opinion. Public support is an important resource that they have to marshal in order to pursue their agendas. And part of the. There's a couple. I mean, there are many problems with Trump. One of the just political problems is that because he isn't really that interested in governing, because he's mostly interested in sort of self aggrandizement and like lining his pockets. It seems like he's not so responsive to public opinion in the way that a president with like an actual governing agenda might be responsive to public opinion. And he has no desire or sees no point in trying to recoup or save or marshal those resources for future agenda items. And then he himself personally, as a personality, does not have any other mode but relentless escalation. Right. And so if he's entering a situation where his popularity is on the decline, where he seems to be a lame duck, there are precedents, right, from past precedents for how you might handle that situation. He can't do it, like, on a very basic level, he can't do it. And so one thing I think, to look ahead, there's going to be, there will be crises, there will be challenges. Is the president equipped either politically or psychologically to handle them in a way that might bolster his standing with the public? And I think the answer is no. And so I'm not, you know, I'm not going to make any predictions, but I will say it, it feels as if right now is the most popular he's going to be.
- [25:38]
B
Well, I have a, I have a over the next year question going backwards. Do we think he knows what the situation is like?
- [25:45]
A
No.
- [25:46]
B
Who's going to tell him? I mean, is J.D. vance, who basically is sucking up as hard as he can at any given moment, is he going to march in there and say, sir, we have a problem? I mean, who's in that position? I mean, is he even aware?
- [26:01]
C
That's a great question. And I would say no. Right. He's so much about being president. I wrote about this last year before the election, and it was sort of just like one of my frustrations about election coverage, which is that we talk about the presidency in terms of policy, but like, in a real sense, like, the president can't do that much policy wise, like, directly. Right. Like, the president should have a legislative agenda, should have some sense of what they want to do with the executive agencies. But, like, the job of the presidency isn't a policy job. It's a management job. And all management jobs, all management jobs are fundamentally information jobs. They're about cultivating information, they're about filtering information, they're about processing information, and they're about getting the best information you can to make decisions. And the presidency in particular is bombarded with information, but also good presidents are aware that the best kinds of information they can get is often political information. Sort of how the dynamics of the agencies are looking, how the dynamics in Congress are working, how everything looks from a political standpoint. And Trump has created this bubble for himself where none of that information gets in, like, none of it whatsoever. He's sort of completely, he's like blind to so much of the necessary information for just doing, to being a barely competent president. So I think you're right, Michelle, to suggest that, like stuff about public opinion, stuff about a standing, he just may not even be aware of it.
- [27:32]
B
Does that make him, like, if he has any sense of this as he goes along as a lame duck, or if he just gets the vibe that he's being handled differently in Congress, does this make him more or Less dangerous, do we think, as he enters this new phase?
- [27:49]
A
Oh, I think he's gonna be more dangerous, but with the possible ameliorating effect of Congress being less loyal. And so if Congress is less loyal, they can temper his worst impulses. But you know how we're in a race, we're in a race between Trump's danger and congressional revival. You know, the. And these two things go hand in hand. But one thing that about the Trump bubble, I would say is that, number one, I think it's just true that all presidents are in a bubble to some degree. And it's a bubble that it just exists kind of naturally because we human beings have weird reactions to both fame and power. And so a president is both the most famous or one of the most famous people in the world and the most powerful simultaneously. And so they're used to interacting with human beings who are impacted by that presence. And so it is difficult to live in a truth based environment in that circumstance, just normally. Okay. So you have to actually try to encourage people to speak truth to you, to disagree with you. And this is one of the reasons why there's kind of this long recent history of incumbent presidents not doing very well in their first debate. Their first presidential debate, you know, 84, Reagan kind of falls on his face in front of Mondale 2012. Obama doesn't do his best job against Romney. Right. And so in both circumstances, 84 and 2012, they. They righted the ship the second time. I think the Biden debate is partly a product of that. Who does this debate on those terms and those timing if they're living in a truth based environment? Right. But then with Trump, you turn it as you do with all things, you just turn it to 1111. Because look at the cabinet meeting. Is he living in a truth based environment? By no means. By no means. And so this idea that what he's doing might not be popular, that people are rejecting it, that his legacy could be in ruins in a relatively short order, all of that, I think is just alien to him right now. Just alien. And compounding it also is that MAGA is, believe it or not, more online.
- [30:08]
Than the wokest woke people on the left in 2019 and 2020, that they have taken the problem that Democrats had years, you know, in the recent past being too online, and they've turned that one to 11 to the point now where, you know, you have major figures in the Trump administration who are much more focused on what obscure angry podcasters on the right say about them than they are concerned about a 38% approval rating in the larger public. And so they're constantly tacking towards the pet angry issues of the sort of the MAGA podcasting base. And that's just gonna make all of this worse. That just reinforces the walls of the bubble.
- [30:51]
B
Well, on that magical note, I say we land this plane. And before we go, I need to hear from you. It's recommendation time. What you got for me?
- [31:02]
C
I've been reading a very interesting book. It is called, it's by the great Civil War historian James M. McPherson, sort of, you know, dean of Civil War historians. His Pulitzer Prize winning volume, I believe, won the Pulitzer Prize on the ent Battle Cry of Freedom. I still recommend to PEOPLE as the one thing you should read about the Civil War. I recently finished a collection of essays he wrote in the mid-90s, drawn with the Sword, which are great. But I'm recommending a more recent work in 2014. It's called embattled Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Civil War, and it's a study of Davis as president of the Confederacy as leader of the Confederate military effort. In trying to offer a nuanced and balanced perspective on Davis conduct as Confederate president, I think it's fascinating. I suppose some viewers, listeners may be surprised that I'm interested in reading this stuff, but I'm interested in the Civil War generally, and I'm interested in both sides of the conflict. And part of McPherson's argument is that Davis is often blamed for the Confederates defeat. But he tries to make the case that Davis, more than pretty much any other political leader in the Confederacy, always understood that the goal of the fight was winning Confederate independence, not necessarily beating the Union militarily, and that this singular focus, more likely than not, actually kept the Confederacy in the fight longer than it should have been, based off of its resources and its standing at the outset of the war. So it's sort of a revisionist take on Davis leadership during the Civil War, and I just find that really interesting. So if that kind of thing sounds interesting to you, recommend the book.
- [32:43]
B
All right. David.
- [32:45]
A
Well, Jamel, that kind of thing sounds fascinating to me, and I can't agree more on McPherson's battle cry of Freedom. You know, when you grow up in the south like I did, it was I was in college before I was taught anything other than the Lost Cause story. And if you have grown up steeped in lost causes, Battle Cry of Freedom will blow up that paradigm. Just annihilate that paradigm. So I'm going to depart from my normal streaming recommendation which pains me because I have one. But I'll save that. I'll save that for next week. I've got a book recommendations. It's not a brand new book. It's called the Dark Years by Julian Jackson, a British historian. And it's tracing France, Vichy France, 1940-1944. And it is so fascinating and it's so fascinating on a very particular basis. And that is when you read it and you read the. The ideology and crucially, the theology of Vichy France in the Patan government, it will sound eerily like parts of the MAGA Christian Nationalist right. Eerily. In other words, much more concerned about the leftist enemy within than the enemy. Without much. A great deal of focus on recreating the sort of the religious household as the centerpiece of the society, doubling down on religion and work, as opposed to, you know, liberalism and liberty. And. And. And so there was. It's very fascinating. And you realize they had this very coherent ideology and theology that allowed them to accommodate themselves to Hitler while believing they're being good people by sort of purging the worst elements of what they deem to be the worst elements of French society. And it is chilling and shockingly relevant. So I really recommend it.
- [34:46]
B
Okay, that's just a story.
- [34:48]
C
Can I throw in some supplementary material that is, I guess, something of a streaming recommendation, which is the 1969 documentary the Sorrow and the Pity, which is about the Vichy France and Nazi Germany and the collaboration. And it involves, since it's 69, it involves a lot of interviews with collaborators and people who were involved in the regime. It's four hours long. It's long, but it's a real masterpiece of documentary filmmaking and I highly recommend it.
- [35:16]
B
Isn't that what Woody Allen is always talking about in Annie Hall?
- [35:19]
C
Maybe. It's been many years since I saw Danny Hall.
- [35:22]
B
All right, well, I am going to take David's streaming gap and fill it. I am a huge Landman fan. For those who don't watch, Taylor Sheridan did Yellowstone. I got tired of the Yellowstone universe after a few seasons. Hugely popular, but he also has moved his attention.
- [35:47]
To West Texas. And Billy Bob Thornton plays an oil landman. You know, he's out there dealing with the cartels and, you know, the environmentalists and all of this. And we've just started season two. This is the best I've ever seen Billy Bob Thornton in anything over the years.
- [36:06]
A
That's saying something. He's been good in a lot of things. Yeah.
- [36:09]
B
And now they've promised me some Sam Elliott, who I'LL just watch Sam Elliott do anything. No, I'm sorry. Like, I don't even care. He can just read the phone book to me and I'll watch it. So I'm just saying we're about, you know, just a few seasons in, but it makes. It makes West Texas oil fields, you know, the roughnecks and wildcatters. It's so entertaining. I have to highly recommend.
- [36:34]
A
I mean, if you talk about Sam Elliott, you can't talk about Sam Elliott without talking about one of the greatest classics in American cinema.
- [36:42]
B
Roadhouse.
- [36:43]
A
Roadhouse.
- [36:44]
B
Thank you. Yes, Michelle, Best bad movie ever.
- [36:47]
A
Yeah. You're my best friend, Michelle, for knowing that.
- [36:51]
B
When we're done here, you're just going to come over and we're going to spend the afternoon watching Road House. Jamel, you're invited. I was going to suggest you go to the White House, but this is better.
- [36:58]
C
I was just going to say Roadhouse isn't a bad movie, though. It's good.
- [37:02]
A
Jamel.
- [37:04]
B
I'm not even.
- [37:07]
C
Good.
- [37:07]
B
It's magic. That's all we're going to say.
- [37:09]
A
Yeah, it is.
- [37:09]
B
All right, guys, with that, I'm going to free you. Thank you so much as always. Let's do it again.
- [37:14]
C
Always a pleasure.
- [37:15]
A
Thanks, Michelle.
- [37:16]
C
Bye.
- [37:42]
B
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [37:49]
The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur Vishaka Darba, Kristina Samulewski and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzic. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
- [38:26]
C
Sam.