Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds.
And Ronda Santis, Tim Poole and Ben Shapurou are all defending Elon musk santi Semitism. We have such an excellent show today, So before as Dave Weigel stops by to talk about how wokeism was not a factor in the twenty twenty three election, then we'll talk to the Guardians Margaret Sullivan about the media's recent failures covering the twenty twenty four election. But first we have the host of the Enemy's List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson.
Rick Wilson, thank you, thank you, thank you. I appreciate you for making the time to cover the podcast all the time, but it's because we need you.
It's the best half hour of my week.
Molly, it's twenty minutes, it just feels like a half an hour. I want you to do a two second rip for me. In a world where the Republican Party was not a complete unmitigated shit show, you guys, and I know you're not even in that party anymore, but you would be able to get your shit together and nominate Nicki Haley and get rid of Donald Trump. Right. I mean, that's what can happen because the Republican Party is a mass, right.
The sixty five percent of the Republican Party that are Trump potties with you know, the bomb vest strapped on their chest, ready to meet the seventy two virgins who all look like Ivanka. Those people will never leave him. But if he passed from this earth by whatever modality, the Republican Party is full of really smart operators and
strategists and consultants and campaign people. I tell my Democrat friends is to let don't mistake the people who go to the rallies with the people who organize the rallies, and so yes, Nicki Haley would be a formidable candidate in every other universe. Again, I'm not standing Nicki Haley. She's got a lot of significant flaws, but she's not terrible on camera. She's not untalented as a candidate, and that really does matter, That really does have an impact
on electability that she can perform. Why is Ron DeSantis a better candidate on paper but an obviously worse candidate in real life because he stands there and looks like a fish having some sort of seizure with his mouth moving up and down. He can't make himself have expressions that are normal human beings can parse. I mean, you know, facial expressions have this long genetic heritage in the human race of warning people against danger or or signaling approval
or desire or hunger or fear. D Santas's case, it's like all of it's in a gumbo any second. It's like, I'm looking at you with lust and yet loathing.
It's just madness.
So let's talk about that for a minute, because because it is, I mean, what happened, I want you to like clearly, Ron DeSantis is not going to be the president, largely because he is terrible retail politician. I mean, look, I was worried about his autocratic, fascistic ideas, but those are not the problem for the GOP base. The problem for the GOP base is that he wears high heels and makes weird faces and screams at kids about how many calories icys have.
That does a lot of sugar, and it doesn't that young Lady Raptor should report to a re education camp.
I mean, that was crazy ass.
Yesterday, I was joking around with a friend of mine who does a lot of advertising branding. We're talking about what the worst brand of twenty twenty three. I said, Moms for Liberty Summer camps. Terrible but a terrible Yeah.
Yeah, but I mean that's I think a really good point, right.
Yeah.
The party itself, the apparatus part of the party, the consultocracy, the lobbyist, the money people. They all want to get past Trump. They desperately want to get past Trump. But they also all recognize that Trump's going to win the primary, and so not going to get out there and do this has always been the problem in this Republican primary field. The three people who actually spoke out against Donald Trump, to their credit, limited, but to their credit were Chris Christy,
Asa Hudgerson, and Will Hurd. Well, Will Hurd is gone, Asa Hudgerson is at somewhere like point one percent. I think that includes family members. And Chris Christy is going to come in fifth place in New Hampshire, the state He's invested all his time and money. All of these people, if they had gone at Trump early, if they had done what you know, again, I'm beating my head against the wife said this back in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen.
You have to never stop attacking Trump. Once you attack Trump, you must never blink. You must never seed an inch of ground. You must never say that Donald Trump was at one time nice to someone. You must never give him a fucking inch. We've got President Biden willing on a stage with China's President g to call the guy a dictator, and not one of these Republicans on that stage, at any of these debates has been willing to say Donald Trump lost the election. None of the ones that
have a possibility of winning. Donald Trump lost the election. Donald Trump is a losing loser who loses. They're so fearful of anything that would arouse the anger and wrath of the base that they will accept everything, including this week's fascist palooza from Trump and his allies.
No, I mean, and I think this is a base problem, right, This is a base problem. This is a Republican base that has control of the levers of power. And there's not a grown up in the room, right.
There are no grown ups in the room. I wrote about this this week. I actually dug up an editorial I wrote for The Washington post in twenty seventeen, right after he fired Comy Jesus, and I said, if you work for Trump, it's time to quit. And I wrote about it, and a lot of my friends who were in the administration who had gone in saying things like, well,
I'm going to be a guard rail. I'm going to make sure we channel him into conservative policies, and all these ideas that somehow Jared and Ivanka will come back and soften the edges. Boy, that this time he's going to govern like a conservative from the Old School Heritage Foundation, limited government, then personal responsibility. Oh, get the fuck out of here.
But did you think that the Old School Heritage Foundation would go fascist before he'd like? I mean, they have now a plan for if he gets back into power, which makes fascism look fashionable. I mean, it's a basically a whole plan of how they're going to get in there and fire everyone normal and just have a complete autocracy. I mean, Heritage, which was never great but was at least a little more normal, has become just an organ of Trumpism, right, correct?
You know, Molly, Look, I actually dug up a copy of nineteen eighty four's Heritage Foundation report to Ronald Reagan called mandate for leadership, and if you read it, it's like peering back into the Middle Ages, because it's things like, we should improve the processes of government operations to reform and make it swifter for American citizens to get their taxes refunds returned and there, and the bureaucrace should be streamlined to improve, you know, using modern technology to improve
the bureauc I mean, and it's all this like honestly, today it reads like do gooder stuff right and now now, and you can you can mark the time when Mike need them.
These were the most evil people in the eighties are now like the philanthropist space.
They're like saints at this point. The thing about it, too was always like their contention whether it was right or wrong, but their contention was, we have to operate under the rule of law, because communists and socialists do not operate under the rule of law. So we're going to operate under the rule of law. It's going to constitution and rule of law are going to define everything
we do. Okay, that aspirational thing. And even if it was just aspirational, Okay, today you've got Stephen Chung Trump spokesperson saying that the lives and existences of Trump's abouts will be crushed and destroyed.
Right if they don't like the autocracy, don't worry, because they won't have We won't have to hear from them because they'll be in Gimo was basically the net net event.
Trump's speeches from Veterans Day since he has in the last week or ten days, Trump has repeatedly gone over and over and over again to overtly tell us, because folks, Republicans always tell you what they're going to do. One hundred percent of the time they tell you what they're going to do. I have an example that I cite
sometimes and people don't always like it. But when Rogue was overturned, and anybody was surprised by that, Like the Republicans were telling you for fifty fucking years they were going to stack the court in overturn Row. They said in every goddamn election cycle, over and over again, we're going to stack the court and overturn Roe v.
Waite.
Okay, you know, so when it does happen, Wait, you're shocked at the leopards are eating your face because you put yourself in a room full of face eating leopards. What the other part of this is when you're calling people vermin, when you're saying you're going to put them in prison because they're your political opponents, Unlike with Trump.
You know, the Trump people are very quick about this, and so online it's like, well, yeah, that's because Trump's fucking criming twenty four seven for the last forty years and he got caught. The fundamental question underneath all this, you know, do we say the F word if you don't know that Donald Trump is a fascist by now?
Because if it looks like a fascist and talks like a fascist, and walks like a fascist, and promises to govern by a fascist like a fascist by putting its political opponents in jail, to porting ten million people, ignoring the rule of law, centralizing all power with the president, firing all the federal government officials who were not directly controlled by the president. If you don't think that's fascism, folks, wake the fuck up. I know, listen, and I get
it that language and words matter. I'm a writer, you're a writer. We believe that those things are true. But a lot of people have hesitated to call him a fascist and to say what he's doing is fascistic. But folks, he's a fascist. I'm shocked, if I may, if I may modify a James Carville quote, it's the fascism stupid, Yeah, exactly. It boggles my mind that anyone can look at the words that the Republican nominee, because he's the Republican nominee.
The words the Republican nominee is saying every day on the campaign trail and on truth, social and wherever that else else he pops up those words every single day means something to seventy million Americans. And he as chaotic as Trump is, you know. Tom Nichols writes, the failure mode of calling Trump a fascist is he doesn't have an organized, coherent movement. I think though, I think he does.
I think he does. In the modern TikTok social media era and Twitter era, you don't need all the coherent organization you had in the past. You just need momentum and energy and direct and Trump does provide that to the Republican base. Look, we've seen this in poll after poll. I've got some surveys coming out next week. Scared the shit out of me because the Republicans now are basically like, no, the other side cheets, therefore we can kill them.
And that is I think a really important way in which Trump has really done something is sort of won. I don't want to say one, but he's really you know, is that they've just continually, every time they're accused of anything, they say, no, it's the other side. So you really do have people in this Republican base who believe that the twenty twenty election was stolen and that really everything Trump does is actually done by Joe Biden.
It is the combination of projection.
And mainstream media news breakdown because there's no widely agreed upon truth. Everybody isn't sitting down to watch the evening news together.
The combination of inversion and projection is what they do with everything.
Right, say more about that, Oh.
No, Donald Trump isn't a corrupt, weird scumbag. Joe Biden's the corrupt weird scum bag. They flag it over and over again. They will always invert the accusation and project it back every single time. It's the simplest way to predict their behavior, and every revelation about Trump is greeted by a high low. On the high side, they do that inversion and say, oh, well, it's Biden's just as bad, the corrupt Biden crime family, and the low version of it is to the Naga, Bass and the masses. Is
this unbelievably exaggerated over the top. You know, it's not just that Biden's corrupt. He called Trump crypt but Biden eats live Baby's in a basement with Hillary Clinton and a pizza restaurant. The crazy is so underneath all this, The idea that Biden is a pedophile, is an international criminal, has this sweeping global crime ring. All of it projects right back. If you invert it the way they describe Hunter Biden as this global criminal mastermind, it's Jared.
I mean, I think that's it, Jared, right. I mean, Jared is certainly making a lot of money from Saudi Arabia.
Does Hunter Biden have two billion dollars from the Saudi's from the Bonesaw crew? No, he does not. But the idea is always to turn the accusation around, yell twice as loud about your opponent. And this is ancient rules of politics. And it's also because Trump grew up in the sway of Roy Cone and Roger Stone and this school of politics that was going out of fashion until social media came along, where you could bullshit your people.
All the time because there was no truth.
Because there was no truth that everything's relative, everything's flexible, everything's mutable. And now I look at a lot of the alarm bells that are going off, and of course they're going to flip it around. Oh no, the Democrats are the fascists. They're the ones who are organizing and
to put me in jail and put Americans. And I said this way back in the day before I was an ex Republican, people like Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim sleeper agent who will destroy America and bring full communism. And toward the end of it, I said to somebody, you know, if Barack Obama was a Kenyan Muslims communist sleeper agent, he was terrible at his job because because it basically governed as a liberal Republican for the most
of his administration and was in retrospect. And no, at the time, folks, yes, I called him every fucking bad name.
In the I didn't want to be And you know.
Listen, I played the whole fucking game to the hilt. Okay, but you didn't know things could get worse, but there was no way to anticipate at that moment that there are a non zero number of Republicans who look back and go, I would trade it. I would trade that shit in right now. I doubt have another four years of Obama if it meant not having Trump, the idea of Trump and trump Ism. People don't want to say the effort. They don't want to call it fascist. They
don't want to call it madness. They don't want to call it dangerous. They don't want to call it illiberal or autocratic or dictatorial. But that's what it is. I ran a series of ads back in the two thousands at a big state wide ballot initiative. The ballot initiation we were running against was like the Protection for Doctors and Families Act or something. It was some trial bar stuff, right,
and I called it like the Deadly Doctor Act. That's not what they say on the ballot, but that's what it is.
It's so the evil stuff makes me depressed.
Trump has told you what he will do ban it in that interview with Tim Miller on the Circus, told you what he will do. They're not just trolling. They're not just playing around. They mean it.
Republicans are running on this idea that the left is anti Semitic, and you're going to hear this a lot. The left hates the Jews, because you know, there is a Palestinian congresswoman that is really the whole thing, right, the left hates the Jews.
They're really working to hang the DSA around the neck of the Democratic Party, which just saying if I were at King Jefferies, I would just say to the four members of the DSA and in the House representation, I would just say to them very clearly, DSA membership has qualifies you from many committee seats.
There's so much pushing back on progressives. And as Joe Scarborough said, and he was totally right, progressives have been and this was yesterday, Progressives have been so incredibly patient and have not hijacked the party in the way that there was anxiety from the center that they would. And they have taken these progressive wins in infrastructure and unions and they have really behaved in a way that has been really I think honorable. And you know, Bernie Sanders
got to run the budget. I mean they were rewarded for it, but I just want to point out that there really is anti Semitism on the right that is like overt.
Yes, and it rhymes with melan huh.
Well, there's mel On husk. You know. I was reading the Steve Bannon thing where he was saying, we got to drive the money lenders out of the temple. Let me tell you who the money lenders are, because I come from a family of them. Like that is not even coded. That is, you know, they want to get rid of the Jews, and I think it's important that we really are out there about this.
Well.
I do think that there is a philosophy that Steve Bannon has imparted inside the Republican movement and party that there are no enemies to my right. And that's why Rhonda Santa S's Nazis campaigning are protesting in Florida and he doesn't say anything because he knows some of those people are his voters. And that doesn't make Rhonda Santis an actual Nazis, right, It doesn't help right. It means
that he will tolerate actual Nazis. I prefer my Nazis in the old fashioned way, driven before massive US forces into humiliation and defeat. But the anti Semitism on the right is so prevalent and so virulent. Yes, is there a horseshoe? There is? Are there people who believe that Hamas is legitimate?
Are there people making tiktoks about how Osama bin Laden had some good ideas? I mean it's crazy, that is completely cresty, but that should be disabout immediately.
As my creative director Michelle Kenny said yesterday, I hope those TikTok kids don't find out about mind calm. You know, it's just like.
Rick Welson, ladies and gentlemen. Hopefully I can convince him to come back.
I will be back with bells on and nothing else.
Naughty Santa.
Dave Weigel is a political reporter for Someophore.
Welcome back to Fast Politics, Dave.
Thank you so much.
I'm so excited to have you here because you are writing such excellent stuff for Semaphore, and you're out and I always think of you as someone who writes excellently but also is everywhere.
Well.
Thank you.
I appreciate that, although I'm just at home now so I'm trying not to feel guilty about it.
But you go to a lot of places, true, and so you really do see firsthand. You know, in this era when people don't really a lot of times people don't go to a lot of places, you really go everywhere. And so I want to ask you the piece you wrote this week about woke, give our listeners sort of the TLDR on this because it's so right.
Well, I don't think I was the first reporter to say no and observe that this was happening. You like to be first, but castmember back to the beginning of the year. Ron DeSantis in twenty twenty two had achieved a lot of conservative goals and taken on Disney over Florida's parental rights law, which the poke which opponent all I don't say a law. Ronda Santis's achievements and these
are re celebrating by the National Conservatives. Of conservatives were against the I'm going to put it so, he's the word woke. That's a childish we're kind of get us the liberal cultural elite from college professors and people who run big corporations to n Cuba and how it handles trans athletes, all this, and he was taking all of this on but also rhetorically his speeches were about wokeness and if you saw him campaign for Republican candidates in
twenty twenty two. He had a riff that he carried into his present of campaign where we'll fight the woke in the universities, will fight the woke, in the businesses, will fight the woke, and the legislature, which is referencing Churchill World War Two. This did not sound silly until until Tom Trump said it sounded silly, and that's when things started to change. You're following out to say where you're Yeah, yeah.
I just wanted to pause and go back here because I want to be specific about what woke means. So in this case, it was things like bud Light having an LGBTQ spokesman, and I think, you know, it would be like a sort of a company having a greater interest in preserve you know, it could be anything from books to the environment to you know. It was the idea behind it was corporations doing good, right, I mean,
even if they weren't necessarily doing good. This all started with the trend of corporations doing good.
This includes if a company announces that it's going to pursue environmentally sound investments, or it's going to do diverse hiring those are both under attack by DeSantis too, and the overall argument articulated by him more than any other politician. I mean, other writers write about this, but really was Look, we have let post twenty twenty, especially this left wing
culture get far out of hand. There are people in our institutions trying to undermine the economy, our children's minds, gender, everything. We must defeat them, and we to destroy them. I would also say those principles are not gone from this primary. They're still part of the of the conversation. Rhetorically. DeSantis after June and Trump kind of made fun of how much people were talking about this. Does not talk about
what this as much he did. I mean, the campaign will dispute this a little bit, but if you as his speeches, that riff has gone. He's changed up the way he talks. There's not as much of a competition for this in races this year, local races, school board races. It just this stuff did not move votes like people thought it would. I talked to Mom's for Liberty for the story. Moms are very blunt and honest about this.
They believe that the cause of getting progressive ideas about gender and race out of school is a popular one and it goes pretty well, but it was not a driving issue for voters this year. What kind of overwhelmed it was a sense of getting things back to normal. Let's make sure the school's standards are good. Let's make sure people are bagged in school, and our test scores
are not following like they did after the pandemic. It turned out a lot of angst that was powering some Republican victories that seem to be about wopness was just about twenty twenty hangover. The other way I mentioned is
that winning means you can't keep planning. When Tim Scott was running for president talking about, you know, getting CRT out of schools, he was running in Iowa and in South Carolina in places that had banned cr critical race theory, you know, the idea that all systems can be broken down and analyzed based on whether they are oppressing minorities, that had been banned for two years.
It had also never been taught in the first place. I mean, Republicans had managed to ban a lot of things that weren't necessarily issues, which does speak to my thesis that it is much easier to fight things that don't exist.
That's right, but giving them a little bit of offer. Here are there academics and are there people who are members of teachers unions who say we're going to teach kids about race younger than we used to. Sure, The point is that Republicans in stage they controlled already said you're not going to do that. We're going to punch that.
You also had, and you talked about it. This backlash because once those were in place, you've had this litany of stories where books that no one really has a problem with but mentioned race are getting carried out as schools by one parent with a problem saying I don't like that my kid is seeing this book that has one sex scene. I don't like that my kids seeing this book that's too focused on slavery. The story sort of changed. Also, the thing I've been for a victory.
This is a Supreme Court conservatives side against affirmative action. Over the summer, a lot of conservative states and activists use that to continue attacking these corporate institutions, mostly and education, and they're just they're just winning. So it's harder to run for president and say, look, the biggest issue is this wokeness that is creepy over the country because it's
not anymore. And just some of the conservatives I talked to with the story say yes, that winning change things, and there is less democratic focus on the things we considered woke. You need Saraba or Mary saying this like you need a dialectic where woke and this needs to be on the march for anti woke this to be really potent and it wasn't.
I mean just it was kind of being rolled back in some ways.
There are fewer Democrats talking about and seeing fewer you know, celebrities post black squares to say their solidarity for some protests or another. The conversation culture changed a bit, and it changed as a political focus in these Republican campaigns. It changed as something that could move votes in down balla campaigns. That's what happened. I only the story says this is over. I don't worry about to move on.
There's new issues. It just time right down on this.
And I think if you start to Clock differently, say how much your Democrats you are talking about police reform and criminal just reform. Why met Clock wrote out too that was in vogue for years. It is now something Democrats are worried about like things change, but in a campaign it can take a while for people to adjust and say, oh, the topics we were focusing all of our attention on are not really relevant anymore to people.
Right. I think that's a really good point. Part of it is that they got over their skis right.
Some of that I said, I was mentioning with some of these restrictions in schools where people said, Okay, I'm tired of hearing a felloment, but like what is in the school library?
Who cares?
I would like like my kid to get an education. I'm not either fit in the school board that's obsessed with what the books are or what the gender policy is. And this has been interesting because polling on I'll explay PHWO notification. So some schools handled differently a kid showing up and saying, I identify as a different gender or a different name than.
I do at home, Please don't tell my parents.
Some schools especially considered as school board ara districts. In school districts, I should say in concerted in Red States laws of in paths to say all right if a kid says that the parent needs be informed. In some places say no, that's the kid's right not to be informed, they could be abused at home, and there were fights about this all over the country. New Jersey didn't have law of school board racist, but it had legislative races. Republicans really ford a lot into this, and they had
polling that said most people disagree. They would they do think if a kid shows up to school with a different identity, the parts should know, But that didn't translate them voting for Republicans. And this is this is like the complication of politics. There could be twenty issues and if one issue really burns people up, but it's not the priority for ninety five percent of the electorate, you can't get much further with it. And that's sort of
what we learned from these elections. It was kind of bubble bubbling op all year, how is this going to go? And then we had elections and we know how let's go. We have not the election yet, but we have a slow decline of Ron DeSantis. That's another test where this is going.
Donald Trump is.
Doing quite well embracing so some of these ideas. He was the progenitor of some of this, I mean he was he was attacking critical or his theory at the end of his presidency on Chris Ruffo's guidies, because Christopher went on Fox, he started talking about it, and Trump acted. So it was not an issue to de Santis could diverse distinguish himself from Trump on that much. It's just
that it did clearly reliction. Voters didn't care about it the way they cared about every of the other thing they associate with Trump.
So let me ask you about that. So you're in it with this Republican primary contest and you're seeing this, and you're you're on the ground and you've been covering all of this. Does it seem like there's a section of Republican voters that like the people who like Nikki Haley, which again it's a very fragmented, you know, never Trump or non trumpy Republican party that probably will still go to Trump that crew. Are they drawn to Nicki Haley? And again, this is you're going to have to sort
of take what you know and go with it. But do you think that they're drawn to Nicki Haley because she's not crazy and because she harkens back to a sort of more normal, less insane Republican party, or do you think that it's some other kind of calculus.
There's a few things.
So she has run a normal campaign that a Republican could have run in twenty twelve or twenty sixteen.
She got it early on.
I think one thing that's underrated is by getting in very early and by taking media questions before the race started about Trump and basically screwing up curly. I mean, she if you go back to read her the political profile Tim Alberder wrote about her, she's all over the place on what she thinks about Trump, and twenty one she's all over.
The place on whether she'll write a Trump does.
But you do those things early, and there is a half life and people stop caring after a while. I mean, this is Melissa Warren doesn't win. But her Native American DNA test thing is a great example of this, Like do you like drap the poison? You process it, and then by the time that people are voting, they moved on from it. First of all, that happened to her, so she made some mistakes. She made her blunders and calculations early, and she's also been very cautious in how
she takes on the media, takes on issues. Shee'e been a little bit looser lately if you saw this with her opposition to anonymity on social media. But she's just run this campaign that is is very conservative. It is we're going to cut off ties with China. She's four and I just mentioned some of the Wokens stuff. She's four, restricting talking about gender and sex and schools. You can
look at what she's talked about. She's not in the detailed platform, but she's run as a normal Republican and her affect is not as culture war focused as desantisis. So what you've seen from like the donor perspective, which really mattered this week. Tim Scott gets out donors are looking at this field, big donors, people who you know, can put a million dollars in keep her pack them more.
And what they liked about Scott and what they like about Haley says somewhat different politicians is it's just the effect.
It's just the effect.
They do not are not as harsh when they talk about cultural issues.
They don't seem crule about it.
They're not totally seen as obsessed with banning abortion. Haley's not. Haley's just dodged as completely. Another example here where She's took your decision early on to say I'm going to dodge this question. My position is that I'm dodging the question if you keep asking me about fifteen week bands. I'm going to dodge it until you stop asking me, which is what happened. Whereas Dasantis made a different bet. I'm the true conservative who had a big win in Florida,
so I can get back. I can create that around the country. Donors are documents and also donors not geniuses. We've learned this cycle, as we learned every cycle. They read the same polls as everybody else, They see the same TV show as everybody else. We saw this with Thomas Petrophy, this wealthy donor who just for the whole year. If its Benjie blaying out going to run for a reason that made no sense. They look at what they see from Haley and how she talks about these issues.
They look at what they see from Dysantis, and they look at the polling Haley because the way she's pitched herself. I think also just our personal characteristics. The people who say it'd be interesting to have a young woman as president instead of the old band just polls better than DeSantis, and that has helped her a lot. And again, if DeSantis' cultural focus was really popular and driving up polls and it was helping with Republicans, they might think this differently.
It just didn't.
And also a lot of these wealthy donors don't don't care about that, like, that's not why they're there are some there are some wealthy dontors who give the certainizations who care about social issues. Most of them do not. Most of them are more interested in their bottom line tax breaks, yeah, than they are in why are you going to prevent the color purpol or whatever from being for me?
He taught the school.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point. I mean, there are certainly crazy religious salads who give money, but many of them give that money to the Supreme Court, right, I mean, whereas a lot of these people just want tax breaks.
Yes, they'll say as much.
What they really want is a sort of Trump fiscal policy without the unpopularity and awkwardness of Trump. They don't like his tariffs, and when it gets down to some of the specifics, when she talks about cutting off ties with China, all that, but the sense how you get it, they don't take that as seriously than Trump saying he'll needy immediately institute tariffs mean.
Well, because Trump did. Didn't Trump immediately do tariffs like one of the few things he actually did do was in the Larry Cudlow School of Economics, was triffs he did.
And this I'm trying not to sound too cynical, it's a little cynical. Hailey does not have the same reputation for I will make a promise on the campaign trail to voters and then rigidly enforce it even if it's unpopular. That's just not how she operates. She is a bring your business to my state, We're going to make allowances for you, or going to avoid this fight. We're going to try to I'm going to try to steal a popular cibe An issue. That's there's a very lower level fight this week.
They kid didn't get some of attention. I did see the Times rate for some of this. But DeSantis and the.
Desanta superPAC have attacked Hailey for just some stuff that she has said that was credulous about the twenty twenty racial reckoning right, so her reaction to the George Floyd murder. DeSantis criticized that just the way she associated herself with it, and like, what would you have to do with this?
It's never back.
Sorry, the DeSantis wire room, the campaign, this is a Twitter so to himself is attacking her for when Bubba Wallace, he a NASCAR driver, said there was a news near his car his garage, she immediately she immediately criticized it. And this is another This is a sense of how online the des antic paint that I had literally forgotten about that, but their attitude was this woman can't be trusted because she takes like the popular liberal media position for.
Him to time.
And if you're a big donor, you don't care, and that's great, and you want them to like win in come taxes, you don't care.
You want them not to be insane.
Right.
Part of it is Desanti's world took the sort of least smart parts of trump Ism. I mean, if you're a big donor, game this out for me, and you've watched Desanti's fight with Disney, you don't want that. I mean, I don't want that. And I'm not even a Republican. I mean, isn't that sort of poison?
I don't know.
I'm just trying to see it from the way that these Republican operators see it, and like, what is their optimal situation here? It's really much more like a Republican governor who just stopped picking fights all the time. It is like a Mike de Wine, you know, io, who is keeping their taxes low and deregulating but not trying to if a culture war comes, it's up through the legislature.
It's not there him.
And yeah, so for Desanti, sufforders, the ones who were in the rank and file conservative talker's advocates, they hate this donor class. I mean they really, they really resent and I haven't seen it turnby turned around really, But the fact that a lot of wealthy people who can give to Republican campaigns are now saying they're into her, I expect them to start using that as a as
a weapon against her. Why would you reject Ron DeSantis who has delivered even when the big businesses like Disney were attacking him over somebody who seems like this big business corporate America is fine with her. Fair question, But
this is this is where we get to. Has the base moved on, doesn't care, doesn't care about that, and that kind of thing, and every conversation, it feels like you need to have a disclaimer that we're talking about candidates who are losing down Trump by thirty points in Iowa twenty.
Five a couple points.
So all of this is happening, is what do we do about are the candidate who might get a chance to go one a while with Trump for a couple primaries.
This is the conversation they're having.
But to the extentsantisis has lost his claim on the Trump alternative lane, which was their argument all year that it's a two man race.
It's going to be two man race.
And I was talking to DeSantis supporters in Iowa today the idea that Nikki Haley could come second Iowa. They're saying, this is ridiculous, that's a distraction, She has no chance, no organization. This is like offensive that you guys are the people think there are willing to split the vote when Ronda Santis should be the Trump challenger. But to the extent they are losing their grip on that role
in the primary. It's all the stuff I've talked about, just that Haley has picked different fights that have not worn as poorly with voters and certainly are more interesting to the big donors or at the moment and has head into the thanksgiving and the advice at the moment, helping her get on air on pay TV eds more than him, more than Rhym the Santas Dave.
Thank you so much. I hope you'll come back.
Oh yes, thank you very much. This is a big, complicated one, so happy we could talk about it.
Margaret Sullivan is a columnist for the Guardian and author of Newsroom Confidential, which is coming to paperback next week.
Welcome back to Fast Politics, my friend, my mentor, Margaret Sullivan.
Thank you, Molly. I love being on your pod.
Well, I'm excited because your paperback comes out in two weeks, guest.
It's the paperback of my memoir Newsroom Contest Bill, which was published last year, and now it's going to be out in paperback. So it could be a gift for like a young journalist or a young woman or a young man or someone old.
Excellent. So we're in this weird primary season where it looks like the incumbent, of course, will run again that's Joe Biden, and then Donald Trump will yet again win a Republican primary contest. And so we have come back to this idea of how do normal political journalists, who are used to trying to jack nuance and to sort of hide their own bias, right, because everybody has a bias, how do they cover something that is so clearly out of the mainstream.
So I'm a little tiny bit encouraged right now because I see and I'm rarely encouraged about the way covers politics. But Trump's plans should he be elected are so extreme that news organizations are adjusting a little bit. And you know, you still see bad things, like when he went off on that tear about all the things that he would It was his Veteran's Day speech, and the news organizations that covered it well talked about how he used the word vermin, you know, which is fraught with these this
is the language of Hitler and others. I have to dunk on the New York Times a little bit here, because the headline they wrote was something like Trump takes a very different and his veterans thinkage, whereas others were saying he was echoing Hitler and Mussolini. But I do think,
you know, I'm seeing some positive things there. And also I have to say that both the Times and the Washington Post and there are probably others have done really important reporting in recent weeks about how what Trump's allies and he are planning should he be re elected, and it should scare the heck out of everybody. We will not have a democracy. I mean, it's like the guardrails
are all going to come down. Anything that restrained him in his first term, as wacky and bad as that was, those things are going to be dismantled, and really we're not going to have the country that we have had.
And I just think it's so important for the press, for journalists to get this across to people, because I think that a lot of regular people who don't follow the news that carefully are like, well, Trump, you know, it's the same old stuppoh that his style is a little off putting, but you know he's a businessman or something. That is what's going on here, and then they get so much attention. We already know Joe Biden is old. Yes he's really too old. But he's been a good president.
Some would say a great president, some would.
Say the best president of their lifetime. Immanat has passed these massive legislations. I mean again, but yes, but we're not talking about him. We're talking about Trump.
Right, But I mean the fact that these news organizations and politics journalists can you know, beat us over the head with the fact that Joe Biden is eighty years old, Like his birthday is still the same as it was last week and the week before. We already know that he's old. What people don't really know is what Trump
would do if re elected. And that's that needs to be pound at home, and that is you know, as you said, Molly, it's outside the bounds of how journalists feel comfortable because they absolutely do not want to be called liberal. They don't want to be called bias, they don't want to be called in the tank for Joe Biden, and so they're very hesitant to say the stuff in a really clear way, but they must.
There's an anxiety, and there's also I feel like there's a real predisposition to wanting to seem you know, straight down the middle. Oh absolutely, And I think that is why we end up with those headlines. There was another headline from the New York Times that also had a similar way of sort of casually mentioning a sort of like norm breaking action as a sort of Pacadillo. The writers of the pieces don't write the headlines. That's right.
I think that's a big part of it. I think that if you actually read those pieces, they very carefully, you tell you what has happened, but the headlines, and you're right. In most places, in certainly these big places, there's a there are editors who write, who write the headlines. And also, you know, headlines have to be short, and headlines have to be you know, able to in some cases fit into a print column or not. But yeah, the headlines are extremely important because we know that most
people don't get beyond the headlines. So you can have a most nuanced, groundbreaking story, it's not going to matter if the headline makes it all seem completely normal, as if this was an election in nineteen eighty four.
And I mean, I think that's a really important point. Now we don't know, or maybe you know, but I don't know how headlines are decided at the New York Times right now. Probably the gas is it should be at least a few editors are also seeing those headlines.
There are editors whose job it is basically to write the sty to read the story, copy edit it, and write a headline on it, and then if it's an important story, it will absolutely be seen by senior editors.
And you know what I would like to see happen is for really top editors and JOCN and others, the head of the AP, Julie Pace to really get their staffs together, including editors who write headlines and tweets and display type, and say to them we need to get across this very important situation in clear terms and brainstorm with their staffs about how to do that. But I don't think that happens because we're all running scared about being called a liberal.
It is interesting, so part of this is that working the rafts works, right.
Yeah, absolutely, Who are we afraid of? And I would like to say that I am not afraid of this, but who are we as journalists afraid of. We're afraid of people on the right describing us as partisan, and for good reason, we don't like that, because we want to be seen as fair and nonpartisan. That's fine and understandable, but when you know you're saying working the refs, when the refs on the right come after us and say see, you're a hack, you move yourself over to the right.
A little bit because you're like, well, maybe they've got a point, you know, or I just don't want that coming at me, so you kind of but you keep moving over to the right. And the problem is that you can never ever satisfy them because it's not really about the content. It's about this whole technique of working the ref yes.
And it's so interesting because it's like, when we look back at twenty sixteen, Donald Trump got two billion dollars of free media, literally two billion dollars if you look at I mean this was calculated by like the New York Times or some one of these mainstream organizations that he had he had gotten so much free media, and it was true. I mean, you could see him everywhere. And part of it was because he was a totally new type of character in the politics sphere.
He was a novelty and by his own description, he's a ratings machine. And you know, that's a really insane thing to say about yourself, but it's true that there is something bizarrely compelling about him, and it's hard to tear your eyes away that I'm not describing that as something good, but he's interesting, Biden to watch him give a speech or do a press conference. It's not that interesting, you know, and Trump is interesting, and that, unfortunately is a value of ours, you know.
Yeah, And I mean that's sort of how we got here, is because people found him interesting and they covered him a lot. My guess is that people are going to wake up in January and be like, holy shit, Donald Trump is the Republican nominee. And I think that that is going to beget till November, until the election, and hopefully not further than that of Trump coverage where journalists are going to once again have to grapple with us, right. Yeah.
The thing that worries me is that people are not all that tuned into the news. Like I was just reading someplace today about this just this one news consumer. I mean, I can't call her a news consumer, but this one person I guess who was saying something about she really likes Kennedy, Yes, because he's been so good on vaccine. Well, she's associating him with vaccines, but the fact is that he's anti vaccine, right no, no.
Oh.
And the other one was you know the people who think that because abortion rights were so limited and so removed and rescinded during Joe Biden's presidency that it must be his fault. I mean, people don't really read or pay attention, and so I don't really know. I don't think that tweaking the head you know, this is what bothers me. We talk about all this stuff. Oh, this headline in the New York Times. I really don't think that that kind of thing is going to influence people
that much. I mean, it would be around the margins at best. But it doesn't mean they shouldn't do it right. They absolutely should.
And if it's the.
Times, they're so influential that, you know, other media organizations take their cues from the Times in some ways, so it's important in that way too. But you know, I always go on about, and I think righteously so, about the decline of local journalism. And one of the things that's happened is we don't have this common basis of reality. And yes, anymore, local journalism has has declined so much. You know, there was a time, and it wasn't that long ago that you know, everybody on the street got
the local paper. So you might read about what you think about certain things, but at least you were dealing with a common basis of reality, and that has really dwindled, and that's a tragedy.
Yeah, you know, you had everybody watch the same newscast, right, everybody read the same newspaper, right.
And I mean there's obviously a downside to that too, which is we didn't have this like diversity of voices, and we didn't have people of color or women to the extent we do now saying things and being prominent, and so that is something that's improved. But the downside is that people have really tuned out from the news, or they get their news in their own social media echo chambers or at cock or whatever it may be.
You know, it's funny because one of the things that in this last election cycle that we spent a lot of time talking about was like, is there a liberal echo chamber right where liberals are sparing with our time?
Right?
Certainly there is. But then there was this hilarious irony where it turned out all these conservatives had gone together and made themselves believe that some of these things that their candidates ran on were really important to voters, when they were in fact absolutely not important voters. And I'm thinking about things like book bands or trans athletes.
I mean, oh, right exactly now. A lot of that stuff has backfired. We know that what we certainly know that the wild Boars thing has backfired. You know, I read this wonderful story about this. I can't remember exactly where it was, but these kids out, you know, somewhere in the Heartland, We're trying to put on Oklahoma, of all things, and the school board decided that because a trans kid had been cast in the play and other and like girls were playing boys roles, et cetera, they
canceled the whole thing. And this very conservative community came forward and said that, you know, they got it put back together. And so I think that, you know, Americans at some level, a lot of us are kind of ultimately sort of sensible, and so I'm hoping that that will prevail if the information gets out there in a good way.
Yeah. And the thing that the right has really seeded, which is so stupid of them, is freedom. Right. All of these restrictions are taking away your freedoms, right, the freedom to choose, the freedom to tell your kid what book to read. These are freedoms. And I just think that that is a really strange hill to die on for the Republican Party.
It does give Democrats a real opportunity if they were capable of taking it and tell them story, you know that your rights have actually been removed and they're going to be removed more. That's a powerful narrative. But you know, the weird thing, of course, is that Republicans are great at pounding home their message and they have Fox News and other places that help them with that, and the Democrats have not been good at it, but they need to get better quick.
It is interesting to me that these Republicans are so profoundly good at messaging. I'm sure you saw this piece yesterday was a piece that Fox News is able to create and I can't now remember where I read it. Of course, that Fox News is able to create and
drive the narrative about things that don't necessarily exist. And I think about it, for example, when people when mainstream centrists news organizations have me on their shows and ask me about the mess at the southern border, and that's something where that has Republicans have absolutely shaped that narrative. Like fundamentally we are we're a country that desperately needs immigrants where we're going to become Japan, right, we don't have enough people to keep this going. You know, we
don't have enough people to pay into Social Security. We are a country that has no path to citizenship right now. I mean like immigration is an emergency. You know, different states are changing their laws so that they can have these migrant children come in and work in their factories without getting in trouble. And yet the narrative is the mess on the southern border.
Right Well, remember how Fox went on and on endlessly about the supposed caravan to scare everyone into thinking that there are all these undocumented criminals and perhaps rapists and everything else that we're going to jump over fences. And it's not that there isn't a mess at the southern border. It's just that it's not the mess that's being described right exactly.
And I think that right now Fox uses a little bit quiet, which is a little bit scary in my mind. And some of that is probably like post Tucker Carlson, but some of that as they're getting ready for an election cycle, well.
Right, And I mean I do think they've been stung pretty badly by those lawsuits, the dominion lawsuits and the Smartmatic lawsuit and one down and one still to come, and the one still to come is the bigger one, so they may be a little more careful. And of course Tucker is gone from Fox, so you know things have changed a little bit. But I think fundamentally they still know what their job is and they will do it.
So true, Margaret Sullivan, I appreciate you so much. We have to problem down that incredible line. They know what their job is and they will do it. There you go, Okay, I'm glad I could give you a good line. No, no moment, Rick Wells.
My moment of fucker this week is entitled what the fuck is wrong with you? Elon? How the Groypers and Nick Flints and the Altright dipshits. Red Pilled Elon Musk is a story that someday must be told. I wrote a piece about it yesterday on subject asking like who did this? I outlined what I figured out the process of it was, but I want to know, like, who's the actual red pill asshole that got to this guy? Because this thing is infecting more and more of these
billionaire class people. And when you look at Peter Tiel and Elon Musk and Marc Andrees and all these other people who have enormous power and influence in money, and they are slipping into this warm bath of fascism and anti Semitism without blinking an eye. Now look, I know Elon's from South Africa and you can take the apartheid out of them.
And his grandfather was a famous anti Semite who moved to South Africa for the promise of greater opportunities to be anti Semitic, great anti semitism, right, But yes, I agree he's gotten more.
Really, my moment of fucker here is Linda Yakarino. Linda quit, Get the fuck out of there. If you value your immortal soul, or your dignity, or your reputation, or have any shred of self respect, just leap, just walk out the door. You're you got your money already up front, Lee,
walk out, now, save yourself. She does not the fact that a the world's richest man on the world's most horrifying social media platform, continues to spew out horrifying anti semitism and no one in his fan base seems to mind should scare the shit out of people.
It's my moment of fucker, Rick Wilson, Ladies and gentlemen, my moment of fuckery continues to be Linda Yacarino and this fucking complete shit show that is X. He's done it. He may have driven us all off for good.
I posted more yesterday for the very first time on Threads than I posted in a day on X Right.
Find the addicts. We've gone over to the more benevolent billionaire.
We've got over to the slightly weirder but less obviously or billionaire.
Find us there on Threads.
Thank you, Rick Wilson, my pleasure. As always. We'll see you again next week here on.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.