[MUSIC]
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Potsay of America. I'm John Love it. I just wrapped a great conversation with Jonathan V last of the book work. It went all kinds of places to what wrong inside the Republican Party,
what a post-Trump Democratic Party should be fighting for. And what it means to have a politics that centers virtues like kindness and what happened to lead a country
to a place where someone like Donald Trump could be president in the first place.
I really appreciate the way Jonathan thinks and writes about politics, especially as one of the rare conservatives who understood from the beginning. Why it was so toxic to embrace someone as awful as Trump.
“I'm grateful to him for coming on the show and I think you'll really enjoy the conversation.”
So here it is. [MUSIC] Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on finally John. I understand that there is a text chain in which whenever Sarah Longwell or Tim Miller has been on the show,
you know that you hadn't yet been invited. I'm sorry that it took this long to have you on because I am genuinely such an admirer of the way you think about politics, the way you talk about politics. And as I said to you on a sub-stack, a compliment that you then wrote an essay about to kind of dispute. I appreciate those who did something that is clearly harder than it looked,
which is be honest and moral from the right or the center right in the face of Trumpism when so many refuse to do that. So I think you have a lot to say to help understand this moment. I want to talk about what you called a grand unified theory of Trumpism, which you summarized as and I quote,
"The essence of Trumpism is that the other side will always choose surrender over discomfort."
I want to use that to kind of help us understand a bunch of different stories,
“but just what do you mean by that and what are some of the salient examples to you?”
Yeah, so I was already at the White House Correspondence Center and it strikes me, this is a lot of the way Trump has approached waves hands, you know, all of it. And especially the way he approached the Republican Party. And I have to say this, I mean Trump really did understand the Republican Party and the conservative movement much better than I did. You know, he saw those people for who they are.
And one of the things he is found even with not them, but just sort of mainstream culture, is that if forced to make uncomfortable choices, people normally choose comfort over like unpleasantness.
And so this was, you know, the White House Correspondence Center,
they invite up on to stage this group of Wall Street Journal reporters who did fantastic reporting about Trump and the Epstein stuff and these people like come up on stage and they're like, I guess I'm supposed to shake this guy's hand and they shake hands and then he,
“then he even like when he went and gave his speech afterwards,”
noted, he's like, yeah, can you believe it? You know, these guys up here, they kill me all the time. Then they just come up and shake my hand. They're like, yeah, it's a little weird, isn't it? Yeah.
And he, he does that again and again. He's doing that right now about Todd Blanch with, with Pham Thilus and John Corne. And they are saying, we're totally in on this Todd Blanch thing, even though he's your personal lawyer. And even though he aided and embedded the Epstein cover up,
and even though it was his idea to do this slush fund. But the one thing is that we really would, we know you said you won't do it, but we just write that down for us there to be great. And Trump's response to this is fuck you.
And when confronted with the fuck you, they're response, I don't know if you saw it. I was, this is literally where I was going next. I want to read Tom Tilt. So, yes, so John Corne and Tom Tiltus have been the hold up
in the Senate Judiciary Committee just for people that haven't following that closely. Yesterday, Thursday, they were supposed to vote on the Todd Blanch nomination. This Trump's former personal defense attorney, the guy that met with Galane Maxwell who wants to be a, the guy who said that the attorney general is not independent,
which was, by the way, Tiltus's or Corne's or Tiltus's red line, that's now been crossed, obviously. They have said they're not going to vote because they haven't received a guarantee.
That they won't pursue a fund to give millions of dollars
to insurrectionists and other allies of Trump who have been, quote unquote, persecuted by Biden. Trump puts out a STEM-winder of a statement defending the fund. Justifying it completely, saying, I want this. This is good.
Let's do the fund. Tiltus quotes that statement. And writes, and I quote, Senator Corne and I have been working with acting A.G. Tom Blanch to end the anti-webdenization fund, and he has been forthright thoughtful and patient.
It's a shame. His confirmation has hit a snag only because an incompetent personal advisor to the president refuses to amend the bogus settlement. Once again, Stalin has been failed by the secretaries.
If only they would tell him, John, the culox would never have been liquidated
if Comrade Stalin had known what was happening. Well, the wheat they would have had were not for these bourgeois farm owners, even now, right, Corne and Tiltus. These are people that have lost their seats in part because of Trump. Who are ostensibly, I would say, probably, you know, when they're alone with their thoughts,
believe they are actually doing something good right now. But we have allowed Trump to move our baseline so far that this is what, this is what stands in for Republicans not going along. What was your reaction to that statement? I mean, my reaction was befuddlement.
“I mean, I don't know about you, but I remember a time when people in Washington”
could be motivated by spite. Yes. I don't know. They're just like, wouldn't there be a fuck me? No fuck you.
I'm not going to confirm your, you know, you just cost me my Senate seat.
I'm never going to confirm your A.G.
You know, good luck, hope you, the hope the Democrats don't capture the Senate. Right. And there's none of that. There's none of that. And it's, you know, you're right about the other side choosing surrender over discomfort.
But it's that there's a kind of, I think it comes from a place of decadence, which is some version of, I don't, I don't think these guys have really thought very deeply of what it is to use power via negotiation, right? Because the idea that they're saying over and over again,
I want to get to yes on Todd Blanch. Like Donald Trump, who is at his heart, what he believes himself to be is a negotiator. That's what he sees himself as. And, you know, obviously we could, we could attack whether or not he's genuinely good at it.
But the basics, you know, set a crazy anchor, be a radical, whatever. He has those, he has those tools in his tool chest.
And these guys are such, they're just babies about it.
It's unbelievable.
“Yeah, they're babies, but here's the thing.”
This is why I think it's vanity. And I think this is about them wanting to feel like they drew a line in the sand. But even their line isn't a real line. Like I am sorry. If Todd Blanch signs a piece of paper saying that,
you know, we won't do this one. What is that, that is a worthless guarantee. It is not worth any. It is not enforceable. You know, this is not a law.
It's not something you have to go to the Supreme Court and have them over turn. It's just a piece of paper. You do whatever. They, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Testified under oath that he wasn't going to do anything about vaccines.
He said that thing under oath. He went, did it? It's not worth anything. And this is something that happened. Well, Trump just signed a deal with Saudi Arabia.
Did you see this? Yeah, we're over nukes like two weeks ago. And the deal was signed. And then he was like, oh, yeah, I want them to recognize Israel too.
“And the Saudis are like, hey, bro, what are you talking about?”
The paper signed, bro. And he's like, yeah, no, don't, don't care. You know what I'm saying? This is this, so even the idea that like, oh, well, we got him to sign this piece of paper.
Is it self ludicrous? And decking it. Which is why I think it's all about self image. And it's what they've got to tell themselves. And I don't understand that.
Like I could understand, here are the things I could understand, John. I could understand them just saying, I'm getting too old for this shit. Fine. Have your Todd Blanch. I don't give a fuck.
I'm out of here. Right? I would understand that. I wouldn't like it. I wouldn't respect it, but I'd understand it.
I would understand the, you know, no, the spiteful. I don't care who you could nominate Jesus Christ himself. And I would not, I would not, you know, vote to confirm him. What I can't understand is I'm going to look at the totality of this nominee. I'm going to find one thing about it that I'm going to set as a condition
that makes it surmountable. And then I'm going to pretend to hold out until you give me a meaningless assurance. So I can say I satisfied my one condition. That is bizarre. Do you understand that?
Like, just as a piece of human psychology, I don't other than perhaps because they're so solicitous towards Blanch himself.
I think they sort Blanch into the category as a guy we can work with.
Right?
Like, you know, he's a guy we can work.
He's a serious guy. Right? Yeah, he's a Trump's personal attorney. He's one of the serious ones. You know, he's one of the good ones.
He's one of the cooks, right? He's one of ours. Right? And he's one of ours. He's not like that.
Right? And he's not, you know, he's not like a Bill Pulti. He's a Clayton. Right? We have the Bill Pulti's.
Right? And we have a Clayton. Now, the fact that in practice Bill Pulti really believes what he says about Trump being persecuted and wanting to destroy his enemies. And Clayton just performs that way for the cameras.
“They still view that as having a distinction as important.”
Right? And so because Blanch is their kind of guy, when they have that meeting, he says, look, some version of he can't admit it. He can't say it's bad. We're not pursuing it.
There's no intention to pursue it. It's dead. But the more you press on it, you know him. The more he's going to dig in, right? So I am giving you this assurance.
It will never be something that I pursue as attorney general.
And beyond that, it is just very difficult. I just need room, right? I just need room to operate within this administration. And these, the, they've allowed, you know, there's a, like, it's a true, you know, relationships, you know, crazy, you'll move your baseline.
Right? You've been in a terrible relationship for a long time. And you're just trying to get through the day. And you just, you just, you just trying to kind of eat out a little wins. Get things a little bit back towards normal.
Me, what are we talking about here? We are negotiating over whether the president can take 1.776 billion in taxpayer money and just give it to his buddies. Some of whom beat up fucking cops at the, the nation's capital in an insurrection that these guys all believed at the time
was so destructive to trump politically and to the country that they didn't worry, have to worry about him ever again. So they didn't have to, to your career theory, do something uncomfortable for the base, which is, uh, in teaching and remove him, so that he couldn't run again.
And, and they have never learned that lesson,
because if they learn that lesson, it requires something of. Remember Mitch, like they'll, they'll take care of the son of a bitch for us. Right? We don't have to do anything on this. They'll do it.
And, uh, this is, I don't know, and maybe this is persistent. I mean, maybe this is a persistent trait of the human condition that we see in all times in all places. I'm sure if we, we're to look at the progress of authoritarianism throughout history, we would see a lot of this.
And from people.
“But Trump is, Trump is very smart about human nature, I think.”
And he was smart about understanding that America's not exceptional. Oh, that's interesting. I don't agree with that. I think that is too, too many moves away from the way he sees these people. I think, like, when he shakes the hands of those reporters on that stage,
he's actually doing what was a criticism of the dinner that actually in hindsight wasn't as true as we said it was, which is, oh, it's all a game to these fucking people. And that the original criticism of the White House car respondents dinner was these people are supposed to be antagonist, the press and the administration.
And they have this cushy dinner, and both optically. So optically, it represents something that is, like, ugly to the American people. But on a substantive level, it reveals something, which is, their commitments aren't real, they aren't serious. I actually, in hindsight, don't agree with that.
I disagree with that. I actually think their commitments were real, and actually what that dinner, it turns out, was about. And something we took for granted is, yes, there are an opposite sides in the game, but they're all believers in the game, right?
They're in the stadium together, playing the game of democracy. Trump's not in that, which is why it's so ugly. Because it's not just that people aren't uncomfortable with this comfort.
“I think that what Trump, it's not that America wasn't exceptional,”
or that we don't believe in America's sort of special virtues. It's that he understood that there's a lot of people who don't actually care about those virtues enough to do something, right? That's true of the press in that room, that's true of the lawyers at those firms that capitulated that is true of the corporate media.
That actually, that after 30 years of post-history liberalism, there is a lack of understanding of who had, you know, there's, there's been a gunshot in the courtyard. Someone's got a call 911. We all can't look out the window when we for someone else to call 911.
Somebody who's got a call 911. His great realization actually is that none of these people realize it's their job, right? And I don't think that's an indictment of our view of America. It's an indictment of this generation of elites. All right, I'll to chill on that.
I mean, I think it's certainly, I think that is certainly true. It may also be true that the rest of America is worthy of indictment, but I'll take that under a prize, man. Pause if America is brought to you by simply safe. If an intruder were to approach your house,
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fascist than we realize and one day we're going to find out.
“And so I want to, this is actually where I want to go next because I think it's an old”
Hemingway. Yes. I think it's an old Hemingway quote. Yes. Many people are fascists and they'll find out when the time comes.
Something to that. I'm not sure. No, I was afraid, I'm afraid I'm falling for a brain equal like Gandhi once said live laugh love, but the gist of it I think does apply. A point you've made repeatedly, which I think there's very little equity equity to in politics is you can blame Trump. You can blame misinformation.
You can blame Republicans. But and this is a paraphrase of something.
You've written 77 million Americans who voted for Trump are some combination of unsurious
decadent or weak. It's a lot cheaper in politics to blame the powers that be that's true on the left that's true on the right. There's not a lot of discussion about the culpability of the actual voters and their agency in this. So can you just as somebody that has been an observer of conservatism from the inside for a long time. Like what, what have you learned about the voters themselves through this period?
Well, so I mean, I can tell you my impressions. I can't tell you that they are like facts that I've learned. What I have seen suggests to me, though, that you to avoid to avoid coming to the conclusion that voters wanted what they chose. You got to start creating a whole bunch of rubbleberg contraptions and the minute you push on any of these constructs even a little bit,
“they start wobbling and you have to build another one, right?”
And so, you know, when people say something like, "Oh, they only care about the economy." And you're like, "Well, but the economy is terrible when Trump left office." "Oh, well, that was just the last 18 months of the economy." And they really, they think about the first, you know, two and a half years.
And you're like, "Well, wait a minute. America's always say, "What do you do for a living like lately?"
They say, "Well, yes, but then they really understood that the COVID was an exogenous event, and that you can't blame the president for exogenous events." You're like, "Well, the fuck are you talking about?" You think, "What percentage of the country could spell the word exogenous?" Right? And so you wind up making all of these things to avoid coming to the conclusion,
you know, people saw Donald Trump for who he was. They heard what he was saying. They heard the things he was saying.
They said, "I would like that.
And I think the reason people don't want to go there is because that's a dark place, right?
I mean, if the conclusion you wind up with is some large portion of that 77 million voters,
maybe not all of them, maybe not even a majority of them, maybe maybe it's only like a third of them. Wanted to this, like this is what they understood Trump to be promising, and they wanted it. That's tough, right? You're now saying, "Well, hold on." That means we've got like 25 million voters in the country who are fascist, like who want a strong man and who are not sold on the liberal order,
“because the reality is, like, you don't need a majority, right?”
If you have a, I mean, how many Bolsheviks were there, right? When they were for the Russian Revolution, it wasn't like there were 50 million of them. You know, they had like 50,000 guys. If you've got a core group of people committed to liberalism, you will eventually get a liberalism. And that's the sort of stuff that, you know, it just keeps me up at night,
because I don't know if there's an answer to it, other than maybe the culture heals itself. Wow. That's not very satisfying. Or there has been, you know, forever. Because I do think that the how many matters, right, whether it's a drug. Because I don't think it is. I don't think it is.
You know, there's this big difference between weak, unserious and decadent. And the distinction between them does matter.
But even if there is this, this group of people, and look, Trump's approval rating always remains.
You know, we've never gotten below 30, right? Let's say it's in the mid 30s on a good day. That's a third of the country. That's like, I'm still good with this, which tells you something, whether some combination of loving it, or actually kind of not getting really good information about it, and sort of, and not yet willing to walk away.
I do think though, like, you know, to get, to get dark and to think about like, how many, you know, how many does he have? There is something about the blood and soil, Trumpism. It may appeal to 25 million people. But there's not that many that are willing to kind of put a lot of blood onto the soil.
Like it is an online movement, right?
It is a lot of people on Facebook and Instagram and social media.
“And TikTok and wherever, and watching television, not, I think it's, you know,”
not as many on TikTok as they would like. But it's an online movement of people rattle, having each other based on kind of narratives about cities and places they're not at, and people they don't really observe or talk to, but they see through television, whether it's an AOC or trans people or whatever.
And when push claims to show, you know, he put a good show on at the insurrection. That is a dark day in our history for which Trump is responsible. It could have been stopped with a little bit of planning by security officials, if they had taken it more seriously, right? Like, this wasn't exactly a, this wasn't a mass mobilization that could have shut down the capital,
prevent it traffic, that kind of things that have been traditionally part of what a true, like whatever revolution or counter-revolution would look like. So maybe they just don't have a guy's totally possible, totally possible. And I, you know, I look at it and it's, it's just hard to know. And I would say it's not new.
This is the other thing that I've really come to.
“I mean, so I talk a lot about my blind spots and my biggest is always been race, right?”
And part of this is just because of the kind of I grew up in a very middle-class suburb, where it was normal and race wasn't a problem. And you look at, you know, like, oh, we have all these authoritarian's. Well, you know, before the civil rights movement, we got all whole swath of the country that was committed to authoritarianism, right?
Before the civil war, we had half the country that was committed to a form of authoritarianism. And so there was, I mean, for people of our age, who came of age in the post civil rights era, there is a sense of like, oh, you know, everybody was sort of aligned by the Cold War. And so, you know, once you get in that 20-year period,
post civil rights before the end of the Cold War, it looks like you've got this vaguely liberal monolith. This isn't to say that there aren't racists in the country and whatnot, but just sort of broadly speaking, right? To kind of both Democrats from Republicans were against the comics, you know?
And there was, last two years of the Carter administrations approach to the Cold War, we're indistinguishable from Reagan's approach to the Cold War. And so there was this like, hey, we're all in on liberalism. We don't like this authoritarianism stuff. And I, because of when I was born and, you know, my political upbringing,
just thought, okay, so that's America.
So this Trump stuff is new and different.
It's not really, it's much closer to a reversion to a strain of American political thought,
which actually ran for a very, very long time. Just happened to have come to an end right before I was born. Does that make sense? Yes. Well, no, it does, it does make sense. You know, whether it's the ways that, and, you know,
“I think there was downsides to this version of a liberal consensus,”
the, the, the kinds of topics that were acceptable, right? The kinds of people that were considered respectable. Like there was a, there were real downsides to this actual, strange period in which also in the media, there was a, there was a real narrowing of kind of the bounds of the debate.
And there are positive aspects to what happens when an entire culture is built around a kind of narrow debate that there's not as much difference as not as much. And finally, like all of that is certainly true. But you see kind of an emergence of right-wing media during this time that slowly starts building power and influence in part because there is this, you know,
there is this sort of, a darkness in us in people, right, in our culture and in people. And there was clear, whether it's, you know, a, a, coughlin and then to limba, right, like there were people that realize like, there's a need that's not being met in a pretty broad way. How much causal effect do you give the sort of right-wing media,
ecosystem as it evolved in where we are now?
Because I'm never sure, like clearly there's some, it has some effect, right?
Yeah, I wouldn't say it has no effect, it has some effect. But I know how much, well, if you snapped your fingers and it all went away, would things be a lot different? I don't know, what, what are your thoughts on this? Here's what I've been thinking lately.
A lot of what we're seeing is a result of a kind of permission. Like what is fascism, right? It's a hard thing to define for people, it's, it's a little bit murky.
“And I think part of the reason it's so murky is, you know,”
there are a lot of people during Trump 1.0, but like, I'll stop calling him a fascist that term doesn't apply. Look at everything's working, right? And I increasingly, I don't think it is best to think about it as an ideology, a goal, it is permission to a kind of evil that we all feel,
which is, I will give into my ego completely. I will not accept any kind of injury. I will not have to admit to any kind of fault. I will not have to be wrong, I will not have to accept discomfort. I will not have to accept nuance.
The reason there was a pandemic is because Fauci, the reason I was stuck at home is because of the liberals. The reason people died is because of China. The reason I don't, I'm not happy right now is because of, of AOC or Mamdaani or whatever.
And that is intoxicating. It is an intoxicating way to go through life. Forbearance, religious virtue, civic virtue, is a bull work against those ideas. We all feel them.
Some are better.
“And others have naturally showing a discipline against them.”
Some are, you know, when you say something, they don't have a bad bone in their body. It's actually very hard for them to go in that way. We're all on that spectrum. And decades and decades of media slowly telling people
to just let go. Just let go. It's fine. You can feel whatever you want to feel, culminates in Trump. Did the media follow the people?
Did the people follow the media? Is Trump a symptom? I don't know. But at root, I think it is. I think it is that thing inside of us.
It is as old as people.
And we will always have to fight it.
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And that one of the things that the Republican Party was able to do
When it was strong was prevent people like Donald Trump
from ever being presented to voters. At least the presidential level, right? And so even if voters would have wanted something like that, it wasn't an offer. They got Bob Dull.
They got Mitt Romney. They got Mark, you know, guys like that. And once Trump appeared. And it was like, you know, when he got big cats in captivity. And you know, like they get a taste for live meat and all of a sudden
they won't take the stakes that you throw them anymore.
“That's what it's like with Trump and Republican voters.”
Now that they have, like, oh, I could have that. I could have the guy who talks about shooting illegals and says only in the panhandle, I can have a guy who encourages political violence who says, go ahead and knock that guy out. I'll pay for your legal bills.
Oh, yeah. You know, like that's the real dope for them. And that's why I have a hard time seeing how we go back. Because the parties aren't strong enough to prevent people like that from coming in anymore.
I mean, just the structure of our party systems are too weak. They're both too strong and too weak. Yeah. It's strong too to be killed and to have a new party pop up in their place, but too weak to prevent things like these sorts of takeovers.
And so you wind up in a sour spot. And voters have a taste on Republican voters. Have a taste for this because they were offered Trumpism. And then you saw when they were offered to Santa,
which was basically Trumpism without the violence,
without the physical violence.
“They were like, back guy, what are you talking about?”
Well, yes, also without Trump, which is who is a charismatic figure. And you know, I think there's, here's where I would say there's like a little reason to be a little bit less pessimistic. Because I think there's a little step best.
I mean, there's a step in there that's important as part of this, which, because I, it's not, it's not this idea that Trump suddenly appears and they can have this kind of, you know, it's like, oh, I don't want to be on burger. I don't want, I want the red meat, right?
That's certainly true, but there is a moment, and it plays out during that first primary, 2016, where you see Trump doing what Trump's doing. You see Rubio just doing what Rubio's doing and Cruz doing what he's doing. And everybody kind of looks around first.
And they look around at each other and they're like, is it okay if I do this? Like, I want, I'm in. I'm kind of interested. This is attractive to me.
But I know it's wrong. It's still, by the, I know it's wrong is everywhere still to this day. It is, the, the understanding that what we're doing is wrong. It, it is inside of, it is the unspoken part of everything. It's, and everything across the media.
It is about asswaging the people who know they're doing something wrong.
You know, when you see that you never see a liberal, you never see a liberal,
say some version of, this is just a political disagreement.
“We should still treat each other as friends, right?”
Like, that's something conservatives. There's a conservative effort to say versions of that, to a kind of make what they've done be normal. But the reason I say all that is because that moment of looking around is a corrective that still exists.
If you, if you go, there can be two gates side by side at an airport. And two different airlines operating that gate. And at one gate, everybody is obeying the rules of when you board. And at the other gate, nobody is, why? It is a combination of the culture of the flyers,
the expectations of the flyers, and the rules of the airline. Do they enforce? Do they send anybody back if they come up with their boarding group that they're not in? Also, hey, is this in airline where everybody lines up? Or is this in airline where we all crowd the fucking thing like,
like we're trying to storm the best deal, right? Like, what kind of vibe is this? And people look around. And maybe they'll be a transgressor, and others will follow.
Maybe they're won't. It's luck.
It's a little bit of luck in happen since somebody's got to throw the first brick.
But that moment of corrective is still available even now. Or is that wrong? I don't know. So I, yesterday I wrote a piece about this conference that the Trump administration did two weeks ago.
So they did a conference on the resurgence of political terrorism. And it's about, of course, irony is dead, right? The people who reintroduced political violence into America after, like a 30-year hiatus, basically, are now like, "Oh my gosh, there's violence, right?"
But the only violence they care about is left wing violence. That's the big thing. And you had Steven Miller and Marka Rubio both give speeches, which were, and I say this in a measured way, indistinguishable from something girls
Or Hitler would have said in the 30s.
And I just went and pulled quotes, like from Hitler and
several speeches. And they're talking about, this is Rubio and Miller about the ugly people who, I mean, they're really getting into though. How do you say it's a physiognomy, physiognomy? Yeah.
The calipers, like, you know, oh, you can tell the just genic types, the untermenche. I am on record predicting a chronology come back five years ago. Oh, yeah. Yep, I agree.
Yeah.
“So, you know, like, and this is, so why is Marka Rubio?”
Rubio, who is supposedly their responsible one, who is the secretary of state, giving us speech at a conference in which he is talking about Americans, this is what he's talking about. Americans, the protestors, you know,
the left wing terrorists, all this, as being ugly and informed and who, you know, spiritually all they can do is destroy the work of the great men and the great culture that the Aryans have built. It just, getting you with it, and I just think, I don't know,
like Rubio is a pretty shrewd diviner of what people want from him in any moment. He seems to think that this is what Republican voters want. I don't know, man. It was pretty, I was pretty worked up about this,
because, I mean, it's one thing to like rhyme with Nazis. It's another thing to like copy them. It is that there is a difference between like the Miller rhetoric, as fascist and as, as you could imagine, even where it's sort of like,
“you know what is good and beautiful and true, right?”
There's a kind of, I don't even know what's going on. Can I read the passage? Yeah, I've got it in front of me. Let's hear it along.
Because it's, it's really amazing.
It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent and teeth of demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who are assembled to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating what looks like a normal person, not one looks normal.
They're all deformed in some way. And their appearance and their dress and their mannerism. Why is that? Why? If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street
and you see an antifa protest, why do the people that are violent and demonstrating? Why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them through the course of their life and their decisions has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways
to the point where their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred. Trust your instincts to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is.
You know what good is. You know that families are right. You know that children are precious and beautiful. Must be protected, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is so much deeper than issues about taxation and regulation.
It's about normal, healthy, order, living. This is, you can, you see that. It's like vermin, dysgenic type. You can tell right there. You could see like Gerbel's looking at that and being like, hey,
“I think we've got to turn this down a little bit.”
I think we're getting a little bit kind of, hey, guys, I know where the Nazis, but this is getting a little crazy. Yes, but so what's what's interesting about that, I saw that passage. And if you turn on Fox News at many points during the day,
you will see a kind of brightly colored over the top aesthetic, including face work and changes to the body that are all meant to be. Like there is, that, that, that, like you, you stop and you read that. And you're like, what are you talking about exactly? What are you, what are you saying exactly?
Because when you look, there is the other side of it is an aesthetic to fascism, right? Like with what kind of extremist aesthetic to what it means to be beautiful, right? And it does flow from this idea of, which is like one of the lies at the core of fascism itself, which is in the same way you do not need to admit to any flaw or fault or mistake,
and you can dominate and actually to lose as always embarrassing.
To concede as always embarrassing, one place where we almost concede is to time and death itself, right? Like we must concede to the fact that we are all of all. Peter Teal has his, well, the techno fascist for sure. But like that, like, that we all have bodies, right? And that actually we all experience pain. And we all experience loss. And part of like that rhetoric is around convincing a bunch of people
to deny their own kinds of pain, right? To like, to model a kind of a strength in which the reason it's okay to support Trump, even though he actually does nothing to improve the country, is that your dissatisfaction, your pain, is doesn't matter, because you actually are sort of a tool of this operation.
Do you know what I'm saying? Like, there's a kind of like, there's a, there's a, there's a kind of ask that they make of, of their own people to kind of like deny themselves, like their own, their own humanity,
How they kind of approach the world.
During Trump 1.0, there was a New York Times piece written,
it was like, there was some storm down in Florida, and Trump had like done jackshet for people. And the Times reporter is like down interviewing Trump supporters who had been like, you know, hurt by by the storm. There's a quote from one of them who says that she was disappointed in Trump,
because she said he's not hurting the people he's supposed to hurt. And to me, this was like the Rosetta stone of Trump as a, like, this is, as you say, like, they can't stop their own mortality, can't stop their own pain, but Donald Trump promises to hurt the people that they hate. And that's really good.
There's a lot of debate about what Democrats should be calling for, what reforms should look like, how we resolve attention, which is if we are able to retake power, it will be a great incentive to use the extent, the new executive strength powers to fix what Trump has done.
While at the same time collectively understanding that limiting the power, the presidency, returning some parogatives to the legislature. And the courts is a good thing.
“People who judge, I think said something interesting about this.”
You wrote about, which is basically some version of there's places
where we need to strengthen the presidency. Basically, we need to strengthen it on the stuff you want me to do. And we need to weaken it on the stuff you don't want me to do. Like, we, it has to be stronger going after inequality and fighting the corporations. But we need to be, the president should be weaker when it comes to,
invasions of privacy and violations of the rule of law. Okay, fine, I agree with that. How are you thinking about executive power and, like, and what it means sort of post-Trump to kind of protect the country from another one? Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't know the answer.
I, you know, I, I, there are, you can see, like, three different pathways for this. And it's not clear to me, which is wisest. There was a bunch of debate about this when Biden took office. And he chose to try to, like, hey, look, Trump was an aberration. That's not who we are.
And what we're going to do is we're just going to go back to being normal. And we're going to fake it till we make it. You know what, that wasn't a crazy view. That was not a crazy view. It was totally defensible.
It was a, a real theory of the case. It did turn out to be wrong though.
“And we just need to say that, like, it was, it was wrong.”
And it wasn't a little bit wrong. It was a lot wrong. And Biden had a successful presidency. He, he had a pretty good economy. Unemployment was below four percent, almost the entire time.
He beat COVID. We had about a 13 or 14-month period of very high inflation. But then he achieved a soft landing. I mean, this is, this is good as a gift. We did not have a recession.
We did not have a big unpopular foreign war. And at the end of it, people chose Trump again. Yeah. Even with the, I mean, so, so Biden's theory of the case was wrong. What could Democrats do if they take power again?
Well, they could try some version of, we're going to reform everything. And so, we're going to go after the big institutional problems, which led to, uh, Trumpism. Things like the Supreme Court, things like the electoral college,
things like the Senate. They could, instead of that, they could pursue accountability. They could say, look, the system is what the system is. But we're going to make sure that everybody who broke any law during that period that just happened,
whether they were a member of the government, doing things that were legal or whether they were private corporations, who were participating in illegal things, you know, doing frauds and whatnot. Everybody pays a price so that people see going forward
that if you get another strong man, if you go along with him, there will be consequences. Right. That's one thing. Or they could say, uh, hey, you know what? People don't care about process.
People don't care about all that stuff.
They care about the bottom line.
Kitchen table issues, John. And you know what, we're not going to get, we're not going to get distracted by worrying about the past and fighting the old fights of the old generation. We're going to look forward to building something new,
something that really matters to people's lives. And look, you know more about Democrats than I do. But my sense is they're going to pick door number three. If they were getting the power again, and I'm like, great. Good luck.
Part of it is like, I worried about that. I worry that there is going to be polling that says very clearly,
“you know, some version of, do you want to look backwards?”
Or do you want to go forward to people going to say, gosh, I want to go forward. And that will be a real, there will be a lot of pressure on Democrats to say this. And then you will have the Democrats that are the smart and
Messengers who say some version of,
we kind of walk at you gum with the same time.
You know, they're going to say it on this show. Or they say again, John, we've got to walk at you gum at the same time. So we've got to look forward, but also we have to fight for accountability. But all of it to me is avoiding what I think,
I think in like in the Democratic heart, right? Like what it, what would, what would the, the kind of engaged Democrats who kind of been part of this debate for a long time? What are they really, what are they really saying that they want? What they want?
Or what I, what I imagine some version of this is what people think we need, but have find it hard to articulate is. We need a period in which we have some version of another founding, right? Like we've been through several findings, we in which we kind of have a big debate about authority and limits.
In that period of friction, there's a lot of room to operate. And then laws and norms kick in and it gets constrained, and you get stuck in that for a long time, right?
“That's what happens after the revolution,”
the constitution, the civil war, and the civil rights movement. And we're kind of, we're maybe we're due. And what that looks like, right, is to the bootage point. You kind of want to period where you can have a president who can operate like Trump,
tear down the ballroom, kind of remove all the executive orders. You've all come around. You've all come around with me on the ballroom. You know what? I'm going to put your values to the test right now.
Would you tear down the new delus? There's a new delus? He wants to build the new delus airport. He wants to get rid of the people movers. You're going to tear that down too.
I mean, to what end? It's a fixed the fact that delus-- Is this an infrastructure? Yes, he's announced this week. A giant plan to-- he personally has approved the designs for new terminals at Delus,
which include getting rid of the people movers, and a 32,000 foot parking structure. Now, should the president be walking through the details of a new parking structure,
“when we're at war with Iran and have no control of the state of Hormuz?”
No, he should not. But he did do that. Yeah, that's closer to highway planning infrastructure, though. Like, I'm not in the Donald Trump's transportation department built a bridge in West Virginia, and so we have to tear that down.
That's not where I am. I'm in the ornaments and the personal monuments to himself, which are things like the art-- Oh, that's the ballroom. Yes.
The name on the Kennedy Center. Well, my view is that anything that looks like a presidential palace gets pulled down. Yes, anything-- Because we have to show that there's no throne there. You know, show the next guy.
Anything that any part of his infrastructure where you could imagine, Oude and Kusay walking out-- Yes, to say hello. I think you got a-- I think you got a--
I think you got a-- But back on this, that you want to do a court expansion. Get rid of the filibuster past some sort of-- You know, repeal the big, beautiful bill taxes. There's a lot of sort of big, strong, executive leading the Congress towards a singular goal.
But then-- And by the-- But then, at some point, you also want to reassert the Justice Department as an independent body, which I think we-- At this point, depending on the court,
“you have to do through law or constitutional amendment.”
You want to reassert Congress's prerogatives over the national security state, which requires legislation. Maybe at this point, also a constitutional amendment. There's a bunch of ways in what you want is a period of time where the Democratic president operates like Trump
before a whole set of rules kicks in,
in which there can never be a Trump again,
which is exactly the kind of thing that dictatorships are made of. Right? Like that-- Like that's what you know what I'm saying? Like that is what people want and yet what that is the problem. That is the problem.
That's the tension. That's what they think they got with Trump. That's the tension. And the other-- I mean, there is also a false sense of insecurity here,
which is that if the-- if the people in a democracy want a Trump, they will get a Trump regardless of what Democrats build in the guardrails, right? Because the guardrails are people.
And if America wants authoritarianism, it's going to get authoritarianism. It's going to get a strong man. So you can't fix that part of it, right? And so that, honestly, that does--
I was making fun of the, you know, Democrats just want to look toward the future. Maybe that is the answer. I don't come to you with answers, John.
Maybe the answer is you do have to look to the future
so that you build some things that people don't think, yes, I want to strong man. Maybe that's-- I don't know. I don't know. To me, that doesn't feel like satisfactory,
but that doesn't mean it's not the right answer. Well, there's also, I think, I think your story of Biden, and I am a great critic of Joe Biden, is a little-- I think it's a little bit over-determined. In that, if Joe Biden's theory, right,
Was we have to demonstrate what a democracy should look
in sound like.
We have to reassert some normalcy.
“We have to achieve some big policy goals”
to demonstrate that government can work. And because there was an insurrection and he's such a pariah, the Republicans will move on, and they will have a primary that sits where you end up
with someone somewhere between Trump and what Rubio sounded like in 2014. And you kind of muddle through, right? Like, you know, there have been plenty of cases with history where the kind of charismatic leader goes away.
And everybody kind of-- you don't go back to where you were. But it mattered that there was one charismatic leader and without them, people kind of go back to old habits. The problem was to meet two things. One, Joe Biden was way too fucking old.
And as a result, kind of became very-- couldn't communicate and his weaknesses as a leader became evidence of his age, his age became evidence of his weaknesses and became a downward spiral combo for her,
for her best efforts, was unable to get out of that for various reasons. The other is you could have had Joe Biden doing exactly what Joe Biden did.
“And you put Adam Schiff at DOJ instead of”
Merrick Garland, or somebody gave Merrick Garland, you know, some Adderall in his oatmeal every day without his knowledge. And suddenly you have some prosecutions happening faster. Trump is unable to run for office
and the world looks very different. Possible. I mean, I should say in all this, it is also possible that everything just kind of fixes itself on its own, right?
It's possible that none of the things that we've talked about happen and yet a decade for now, things aren't worse than they are right now. They may not be a ton better, but like we haven't continued sliding into authoritarianism.
We're only like a third of the way there,
the way we are now. So that's also possible. I'm open to that. I'm open to all possibilities, John. We often find ourselves in the trap of saying,
"Well, what was the real reason?" And what I use is like murder on the Orient Express, who did it, all of them did it, right? And it is. It's Biden was too old and Trump was charismatic
and Merrick Garland didn't act, you know, with enough impetus. Like it's all of those things together, but it's also like, and the Supreme Court was pretty clearly going to try
to make sure Trump could run again. Like they wanted Trump to be able to run again.
“They were going to do whatever they could to do that, right?”
And so you are in this... Physics people call it a simple complex system. It's not a fully complex system. They're like ecosystems, they're gigantic, and they're incredibly resilient.
But a government is a simple complex system, which is to say, it's like an engineered by a system. And those sort of things simple complex systems are actually really delicate,
because they don't have all the redundancies and self-governing features built into them that true complex systems have. And I think one of the things we've learned over the last decade is that
the American experiment is a simple complex system, not a truly complex system. The guardrails are not real guardrails, and that if the people go rotten, or sort of lose their minds temporarily,
or decide they want something bad, they will get it. And maybe you don't need all the people, maybe just need 47% of them distributed in the correct way or something like that,
but they're going to get it. And so I wish I knew what the answer was to all this. Virtue. The answer to this is virtue. Let's end my talk about Virtue for a moment,
because it does seem to be, you step back from all of this, and it is just a collective, you can blame the elites, you can blame the voters,
whatever you want to do, there is a sense in which we've just sort of lost a kind of muscle memory for the importance of making Virtue a big part of identity, like I remember when I,
there was something that would happen on sitcoms, when I was just a part of sitcoms all the time, which was there was a character who would drive back to the bank with the 20 bucks. They got an extra 20 bucks,
and that character would always drive
back to the bank with the 20 bucks. And even in that it was a cheesy thing, obviously a cheesy thing about, but there is a kind of, and maybe Trump is a reflection of it,
he also makes it worse. I think about Fauci, when public health officials said, you don't need masks, right?
They were doing it because they wanted health, in a crisis, they're worried about the health system coming apart, they're worried about first responders dying of COVID. They're desperate to get those people masks,
and they and public health had a choice.
The choice was between trusting the American people
with the truth, or doing a kind of nudge
because you want to make sure that the PPE gets to the hospitals.
They chose to lie, because they didn't, because they didn't lie heavily. I would say this. So I've done the Fauci thing a whole lot.
Fauci didn't lie. What Fauci did was a very lawyerly depends on what the definition of is. Yes. So I want to be clear.
Anthony Fauci was somebody that devoted his life to public health. He's being smeared to be blamed for the entire pandemic, because these people are being fundamentally dishonest. Donald Trump was president.
He was lying the whole time. He was a man that did his best in a massive emergency. And I'm not just saying him, collectively, the goal was to convince Americans that they did not need masks.
When they did, because, and I think rightly, they knew that if you said to the country, don't buy masks right now. They're lifesaving,
and we need to save them for the people that are in the, in the shit right now. I don't think that they were wrong, right?
I don't think they were wrong.
And that, and like, and to me, like that is at the root of this, the,
that sort of politicians, not politicians and officials, not trusting, the voters, the voters not trusting those people in return.
And I just don't know, like, the question is, what does a virtuous cycle look like, in which you're kind of getting back to a,
a common sense of, of high trust society versus low trust? I wish I knew. Honestly, I wish I knew John,
“because I think you're right about the general public.”
But at the same time, the general public is made up of all of those nurses, and orderlies, and texts, and docks,
and who showed up to hospitals, taking care of people, especially like in New York, I mean, I don't know if people were meant,
everybody is like this, this mass, you know, forgotten, this mass forgetting about COVID,
because like nobody wants to remember it. But in Europe, like fucking doomsday, you know, like they were just like,
mobile refrigerators with bodies, just, you know, stacked inside the, on the alley's outside hospitals. It was,
it was like seeing one of these virus movies. And, and the hospitals were full of people, who just went in and tried to save lives, and put themselves at risk anyway.
You know,
all these essential service workers,
who were like, people who worked at just delivery and logistics, people who worked in grocery stores, you know, check out lines and stocking things.
Like, that's true, too. Like those people did that. That was virtue. And so I,
it's become so hard to understand. Well, why is it that these people will exhibit such true virtue at the individual level? But then when we ask,
“do you think people respond collectively in the right way?”
Or would they have run out and just like, hoarded, you know, like hoarding toilet paper every time there's a warning about sometimes storms?
And I don't know how to square the circle there. And, you know, maybe, maybe the answer is like, you just have to trust people.
And if they make the wrong choice so be it, and everybody lives with radical candor, I don't know the answers. And I wish I did.
I think part of it is, I do think it matters that Donald Trump had been present for several years. And,
like, he makes these, kind of, he makes mistrust and cynicism more true of us.
And I do think maybe the answer, like, in the same way, why do I think you and Sarah and Tim,
and others who have had, you know, profound disagreements over the years. Um, stepped up when others didn't.
Well, I think part of it is, um, these virtues aren't just something you believe in.
“I think everybody would claim to believe in them.”
They're, they were part of your identity, right? They were part of your identity. And, a politics in which Democrats,
you know, find a way to make those kind of virtues central to, how we talk about ourselves, how we talk about what it means to be an American.
I do think is kind of points to the way out, because I think the difference, I do genuinely think the difference is, is, what are you?
Are you Republican? Are you a conservative? Are you a Texan? Are you an American? Are you moral?
Are you righteous? Are you honest? Are you somebody that is good at? Are you fair dealing, right? Like,
do you cut lines? Or do you understand why you shouldn't? Even when you see others doing it, right? Like, these kind of simple things are like kind of,
I think part of what Trump makes less, less salient to people. And I think maybe that's part of the way, whether inside the Republican Party, or in the Democratic Party,
um, a return to that kind of moral language, just maybe part of what has to happen next. Yeah, and I wish,
again, I don't have any of the answers on this stuff. I, I think a lot about kindness,
Because kindness is one of these values
that sort of stands over faces, you know,
“like if you can fix kindness as your north star,”
that cuts across. You don't have to be, you know,
a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or an F like,
it's just, it's universal, or it everything understands kindness. And to the extent that we could try to, just model that,
and be, me talking about kindness. I know. It's hysterical. I,
but you're, you're rumored to be a very kind person. That's what the rumour is. I mean, I mean,
when they're, when they're, they let you out of that rumour in. But I strive for it. Right.
I mean, it is something, I think it's something we could all, we can all, strive.
We can all be aspirationally kind.
“And maybe that collectively leads us back somewhere,”
less terrible. And I will also just note too that, like, in politics,
these kinds of virtuous words aren't always going to be,
on the list of polling questions, or the list of topics that rise to the top. But I will remember, when Hillary Clinton was campaigning in 2016, and I know every losing campaign did everything wrong,
and everyone in campaign did everything right. And we shouldn't have poked him on, go to the, went to the polls. But when she would say,
what we need is love and kindness, it was electric. It was the most electric thing that came around her. And a campaign that was kind of more in the kind of neoliberal language of kind of technocracy.
That idea of kindness did, like kind of bring something out of people. So I do think it's a very good place to leave it. Jonathan Veelast. It has been so good talking to you.
You know,
and I hope you felt I was kind today.
This was so great. I love to hang it out.
“I would do a show with you every single week.”
You mean Alex Wagner. Wow. This is great. Okay. I got to talk to my bosses.
Oh, wait. We're in an opinion company. You mean Alex. What are you going to do? We'll do a show with that pinball.
Let's show that comic. Let's get on the blow and do it. Whatever you want. Yeah. We can talk about watches too.
Got a lot. Are you a watch guy? I'm a watch guy. I got a grand saco going right now. Oh, which one?
I got, I got the, it's the, it's the cherry blossoms. It's the cherry blossoms. Oh, the shungla. Oh, you know, it's a classic.
Grand saco is a, if you love grand saco, then you really love watches. I'm, I'm a nerd. This is, for those, this is a, this is a nerds.
This is a nerds watch. And it, and nerds stop me on street. Because they know because they know, but everyone knows that. Oh, that's a saco.
No, no, no, no, my friends. It's a grand saco. And the story of grand saco. It's a rotsu polishing my friend. And what people don't know is that there's a period of time where
saco wanted to compete with the Swiss. And so they've had two factories. Grand saco and King saco. And they said fight to the fucking death boys. And you know what?
They did. Grand saco won. It's the Japanese way. The Japanese way. John and so good to talk to everybody.
Go subscribe to the bull work. Go subscribe to the triad. His, his newsletter. And, and subscribe right here on this channel. Help us build a pro-democracy ecosystem to get good information to people.
And that, that, that, that prize is kindness. How about that? Pots of America is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Ferris safari with re-churlin, Alijacone, and Adrian Hill.
Our team includes Matt de Groat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Carroll, Tel Aviv, David Tolz, Mia Kalman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is probably unionized with the writer's guild of America East.
