Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Donald Trump says his very talented daughter in law, Lara Trump, should run the RNC. We have such a great show for you today. MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissman stops by to debunk all Things her. Then we will talk to Harvard professor Fetis scotch Pohl
about how the right wing is mutating. But first we have the host of the Bulwark Daily, The Bulwarks, Tim Miller. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Fan favorite Tim Miller.
All right, give me that gold watch.
I'm going to give you a minute of plugging. Tim is now the daily host of the Bulwark podcast, which means every fucking day you can get Tim.
Miller in your ears every day. That's right, baby, and then even sometimes twice when I come hang out with Molly John Fast.
Yeah, the melodious sounds of Tim Miller.
I did mention when I did the handoff from Charlie, I don't really have his radio voice. He had that beautiful cadence and the dulcet tone, and I said, you're just you're gonna have to substitute that beauty for my snark. You know, hopefully the laughs will overshadow the vocal fry.
Well, I, as a practitioner a vocal fry myself. He does have a real dulcin I mean, he is like from the radio world that doesn't exist anymore, which is why we love him and think he's so really important. So let's talk for a minute about I have a piece coming out today, so I always have to plug my work in other venues. No, I'm just kidding, but the anxiety election, because that's basically what this is, right.
Yeah, And I haven't read your piece, so I'd look forward to reading it. But we all have anxiety, and I think this explains I talked about this a little bit the end of the Monday Bollard Pod. People are mad at each other right now if they have different opinions about like the right strategic approach, you know, like all of us on the same team, like the anti Trump pro democracy team. Like there's a lot of infighting
happening right now. It's like, oh, you're being too mean to bind and it's like, oh no, we're actually trying to help by pointing out, this is a real problem that needs to be solved, and it's like, no, if you mentioned age, then you're then you know, you might as well be a Trump or just put your red hap backer. And it's kind of like everyone needs to
take a breath. Tensions are high, Anxiety is high for good reason because the threat is so big, and it's like everybody that's on the same side, Like if somebody is a different strategic approach than you, it's okay to listen to It's okay to say that's dumb idea, actually, but it's also okay just to listen and say, Okay, how can we work this through to put the good guys in the best position for victory possible nine months
from now? And I think that there's there's just the nerves are fraying discussing that for sure.
I think that's really right. I also think that what you're saying about the stakes is really important. Right. The thing that's like so hard for me as I watch it is like twenty sixty and we thought, okay, Trump is it's not going to win then, And I kept saying, oh, He's going to win, you guys, and everyone'say, no, no, he's not gonna win, It's okay. So then he wins. Then there's this feeling in twenty twenty you know, if
you ignore him, he'll go away. What happens instead is that he poisons what little was left of the Republican Party. And now there are like what was heartening was the Senate vote yesterday at foreign aid right, foreign aid, This is like what Reagan ran on foreign aid right, Like, this is what we do. We are the country where you know, we protect Again. I personally that's it's not my worldview, but like you know, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama,
you know, we are the shining city on the hill. Again, not my personal view.
What what you don't think we're shining? You don't think we're on a hill, Molly, We're not the land of milk and honey.
I get itchy with nation building, but the point is here, it is this is like a central tenet of American democracy. And the numbers were pretty good in the Senate. I was actually surprised that they were so high, but then Mike meg and Mike Johnson was like, now we're not going to do that.
Well, anytime you're heartened, I like to just kind of rip that heart out and bring in the darkness. Yeah, I was not that hardened twenty nine. I'm not at all itchy about jingoism. So those are just two areas of disagreement to the USA. So here's the problem. Two things happened in the past couple of days that are disheartening for me. On this bill. You're right, you're right.
It passed seventy votes. That's good, and I think that that is very important for Ukraine in the short Ukraine needs this because if they don't like that, you know, it's handing this thing over to Putin and the time is ticking and having a window to do this, So that was important. The problem is thirty nine center Republicans voted for it two years ago down to twenty two, so it's moving the wrong direction. Let me tell you,
I'm teen. People didn't change their mind, Okay, like they just are bowing to pressure from the base, which wishes this bill was killed for the most part a majority of the party. Then the other little nugget I want to throw on top of there's my Gallagher. That little coward left the Congress at a from Wisconsin at age thirty nine. He's the one that every all of my friends who are still in the Republican world like hanging their hat on, like there are still some good Republicans.
Look at Mike Galigher, Well, Mike Gallagher voted against impeachment, so he's not that good. He leaves. This is the old Adam Smith. You know, markets, supply and demand, this is my this is my my free market as I'm coming back in, free market is at work in the Republican Party. The demand from the voters is for mega it's for isolationism, it's for bigotry. You know, it's for
closing borders. And if you are the type of candidate that does not like all that stuff, you're either checking out voluntarily like Mike Gallagher, or you're losing in primaries, or you're very old and in the Senate and people are waiting for you to be pushed out. Okay, that's like that is it? Like the things are moving in exorably the wrong direction with the GOP that said it's good for Ukraine. Hopefully they can figure out a way to get this up for in the House, because it
would pass if it got up for a vote. It's just a question about whether Maggie Mike Johnson has the stones to just block it.
It's so interesting, Mike Johnson. I want to have a minute on Mike Johnson. One of the weird things about trump Ism is that you get jobs that you absolutely are not qualified for because no one else will do that. Yes, right, like the whole Trump administration. You'd be like, you're the under secretary of what And it was like, well, the other choice was like a guy who was like somebody's cousin.
That is true. I had a whole kind of chapter about these people in the book about how, like you just these strivers that got into Trump world, that they had no chance getting this job in any other administration. Like the idea that Sean Spicer would have been the press secretary for any other Republican president like is insane,
Like nobody would ever have picked him. You could say that about all all this press secretaries really, and so it like self selects people that are like particularly sociopathic, right, because I am so ambitious that I am willing to take a job for a guy that has no loyalty and that I recognize is completely morally repugnant, because this is my one chance to do it, And so that is not really a great personality trait to have for people running the country.
I think that's a very good point. So Trump has now he controls the House of Representatives, or at least he feels he does. They're not a huge majority, but he feels he has it. He is in a power struggle with Mitch McConnell. They try to get him out so he can control the Senate right, which Republicans don't control, but they hope they will soon. And then the RNC. Now you have some RNC experience here, I do as
an outsider. It seems to me like Rana Mitt Romney's niece has the worst job in the entire world, but still Trump wants to give it to his daughter in law. Discuss a lot there.
Yeah, I mean Rona Romney had the worship of the world and somehow managed to keep it for like over a half decade, like despite being the worst party chairman in modern political history and being miserable. It's hard to understand it. I guess she just liked those mar A Lago Cougar parties so much that she couldn't give him up. But yeah, so she gets pushed out. Now Trump is going to push in a guy that was the North
Carolina party chair for the head gig. And this guy was famous basically for claiming to Trump that Trump won North Carolina because they did such a good job of shutting down the fraud, like, you know, like they put on the good machines in North Carolina, mister Trump, fantastical lies about the twenty twenty election or how you advance
yourself in the Republican Party. Now, so he gets the main job, and then Trump is going to have his daughter in law as the co chair, you know, just to make sure that he has somebody on the inside in case he needs the party to like write checks for his legal defense or whatever, you know, just to just to make sure that any kind that there's a question of, well whether the party should do the right
thing or whether it should just be a service to Trump. Yeah, they'll make sure there's a Trump family member on the phone call to hear if there are any dissenters in the building. It's very it's very third world. It's very like Bella, Russian it is.
It's very like Banana Republic. Right, are we allowed to say Banana public? Yes?
Yeah, I think so.
It's interesting to me, like part of the reason why Trump has decided it's rawn A's time to go. Partially it's because he wants the RNC to pay his legal bills. The excuse he's using is that she's not raising enough money for him. Would anyone else do a better job? I mean, I'm sorry to do this, but I mean just I mean, and I'm hardly a fan of Rana, but it seems to me like this is like one of these times where Trump is like picking Carrie Lake to run for Senate after she is already the governor.
It's one of these things where it's so incredibly self destructive and stupid you have to pause and be like, what, yeah.
And did you ever watch the TV series about Chernobyl? You know, like he's like Soviet like systems where everybody is in service to one god king. Like there's some flaws, okay, you know, because people lie and there's backstabbing and so yeah, it's it's scary that Trump and these guys are out there and that he's winning in the polls. But like the internal processes are not efficient, Like this is not
a well operating machine here. Okay, it's hard to see how somebody could raise more money, Like the question is who would you raise more money from, Like they are already juicing the ten dollars MAGA donors.
And those people are going to Trump.
Yeah, Like those people are already giving to Trump, so that like there's not a lot of juice left on that orange, right, And so then it's like then you go to the big donors and they're going to give to the RNC for what, right, Like like the RNC has to give them a rationale that they're going to do something that is useful to those guys, and they're like you're them, Like why won't you just give money to you know, Mitch McConnell, right, like the NRSC or somebody like hoping
Nicky yeah or Nikki right. So I'm with you. It's hard to see how I think that they're a really bad way kind of at least organizationally. Unfortunately, there's some other things that are working in their favor right now, but the organization, they're in a bad spot.
Do we have enough information to go on? Like we in the media industrial complex who are in a full on freak out about everything right now about this anxiety election, Like what is the information we are going on? Right, because, like, the polls are bad, but the polls have been consistently bad, and like, for example, I had this guy on who
did this piece for the Economists. He's a recovering pollster, and he talked about how actually the really good polls have Biden down by point five and this is something we saw, We've seen since twenty eighteen, flooding the zone with junkie polls to help MAGA candidates. So like there's certainly some of that going on, right, Like that's not to say that Biden is like, but I'm just saying, like I do wonder we're not getting great information here,
and I'm not sure we're transmitting great information either. Like it's a country of hundreds of millions of people, Like how many are actually reading the New York Times.
Yeah, I agree with that. I think that two things are true here. One is that it's just hard to judge. We don't have full information on how to judge what a Trump Biden matchup is going to really look like in February for a couple of reasons. One that we don't know exactly the third party situation is going to be. Two, I think that there's a lag on economic kind of response. Right, the ecounty has been getting better, but it takes people
a while. You know, you have to do your bills for a few months before you realize that you're like, oh, actually, like things are looking up right before you, you know, look at your Charles schwamb account or whatever and say okay.
And that's the Harry Truman's inflationary transitory inflationary argument, which is Truman had this massive transitory inflation after World War Two that pundons thought Dewe would ride to re election and that did not happen.
Right, Yeah, so there's a delay. So I think that there's a and you see some of this. We can do a whole history lesson, but you've seen some of so many presidential elections, and then there's the Trump. I do think that we don't really know what Hayley voters are going to do because like the Trump of it all hasn't sunken in yet. You know that it's like it's really going to be this asshole. It's just starting
to sink in with normies, so all that stuff. I think that the polls will be not perfect, but just a better indicator in April than it is now. And I think we'll have a better sense of the state of play in April or May. I do think though it is just it is just reality that like people are worried about by age, right, Like that's not bad information, it's like people worried about it. How much are they worried about it? Are they so worried about it that
they might vote for a third party or Trump? You know, I don't think that we really know the second question yet, but I think it's pretty clear for the numbers that people are worried about it, right.
I mean, I think that denial doesn't do anything for anyone, right, But I also do think we don't have great mechanisms for telling what's going on, right, Like, I mean, Sarah a long while does these focus groups, so she at least is like in their way with voters and me and I talk to someone at the White House who said that they do a lot of focus groups and one of the things they see is that it's very hard to dislike Biden. You can think he is too old,
but you don't dislike him. And I wonder how much that is actually an important bit of data right there, right, like that the candidate that even if you have a candidate who is old and who you feel, for whatever reason, you don't like the fact that he's old. One of the things with Hillary was that, I say this as a feminist who spends a lot of time thinking about why women candidates have such a terrible time in this country, I just wonder if being an old white guy actually serves Yeah.
Maybe, And I mean this was the key. I mean, the difference between Hillary and Biden was just the intensity of that dislike, right I In Biden one basically you can just cut away all the other bs and it's like voters who told bolsters I don't like Hillary and I don't like Trump, mostly voted for trum. The voters are told posters, I don't like Trump and I don't like Biden, mostly voted for Biden.
Like.
There could be a lot of reasons for that, but one of the reasons is almost certainly that, which is why it makes it hard sometimes to interpret the polls. Is like the intensity of the unfavorability right like, they were intensely unfavorable towards Hillary and to Biden, it's like, I don't really like him. He's not my cup of tea, Like okay, and so you know, I definitely think that
there's a gender element to it. I think that there's a conservative media complex attacking Hillary, you know, to it. I think that some of it was self inflicted. We just know that that is true based on the results from sixteen to twenty.
It's interesting too, though, that the conservative media has decided to attack and they've been doing this attack right basement
Biden since twenty twenty. But it is interesting to me that the attack they're using is that Biden gets stuff wrong and seems out of it, and their guy suffers from the very same problem, right, Like, even if you're just to to say, like, even if you take this attack and say it's true, I don't think it's true, but okay, but you are running someone who you could make the exact same attack on.
Yeah, dude doesn't do anything and he goes to court and golfs. I literally. I saw one of his defenders said recently that he was golfing so much now because he knows he's not going to have time once he's saving the country as president. What I mean, he has four trials and we're in the middle of an election,
like that is just not believable, you know. I mean the videos you see at Trump were like cow many videos have you've seen of mine, just randomly showing up to people's weddings and walking around to say hello.
Well Trump, though Trump wrote, people say Trump can't do as many events as he used to be able to. And I think about twenty sixteen, like watching him zip across the country. Remember, like you do a rally and then you get on explaining you do another rally, you know, so it is. I just wonder if your attack on the Democrat can be very well repurposed to be the attack on the I don't know that that's a great place to be in, No, thank you.
I can it's not a good place to be in. But you know, again, you just go back to this whole. It shouldn't he be in a worse place? Right?
And you know, you.
Go around and around on this. But I think that he has some very very real vulnerabilities and I think that some of them are not showing up in the polls yet. There's a little bit of a lag, and God will and they.
Start Tim Miller, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Molly John Fast anytime, thank you, thank.
You, thank you. You're the best. Did you know? Rick Wilson and I are bringing together some friends for a general election kickoff party at City Winery in New York on March sixth. We're going to be chatting right after Super Tuesday about what's going on, and it is going to probably be the one fun night for the next eighty days. If you're in the New York area, please come by and join us. You can go to City
Winery's website and grab a ticket. Andrew Weissman is the co host of the MSNBC podcast Prosecuting Donald Trump and the co author of the Trump Indictments. There are a lot of them. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Andrew Weisman, Hey, Molly, so great to be here. I love having you, and I love running into you, and I'm god we're friends, and I also really like you as a human on this earth, of which hopefully we'll be here for a while. But I wanted to talk to you. Not to get too dark.
We're going to get really really dark, really fast.
Really fast. One of the many things I like about you is that you have had a lot of these jobs so well, I can speculate all I want. You've actually like worked on the SPET, You've worked in a Special Council investigation, You've been in the Mueller investigation. You've sort of been in those places where the rest of
us can only speculate. So I feel like your take on her is much more meaningful than pretty much ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the world, with the exception of Eric Calder, who I think had a pretty was pretty pissed he did.
Although I have to say, I don't think he's ever been in a special counsel But by the way, I don't think I actually agree with you that Eric holders. Obviously he's been the Attorney General and has incredible experienced.
I was shocked when I saw that tweet, Like I was like.
Whoa, Yeah, people have come said all sorts of very interesting things. I mean, one of the things that I think he has said is why is he even asking what the date is of the death of Joe Biden's son. I didn't realize he was giving like a memory test. I mean, like, how does that even come up?
You also were appointed by George W. Bush in a world when things were normal, so you really understand the sort of the nonpartisan space that is supposed to be the DOJ.
Yeah, I have served since nineteen ninety one. I've served under I think every Attorney general since then in various capacity. So I think Mary mccordy and I talked about this, which is until, like the Trump era, you can't think about politics at all in your job. It just was irrelevant. And then when I was on the Moller investigation, it suddenly was like a big thing. And it's so funny because now people think of me as some far left liberal, whereas like most of my friends are like liberal. You
were in the government for twenty one years. I teach at NYU Law School. I can tell you I'm not viewed as liberal there. It's sort of the warping of norms and perceptions that has happened, I think during the Trump era, and I mean Trump era, whether he's president or running for president.
I want you to talk us through the decision to pick her, and I think it comes back to the decision to pick Merrick Garland. In twenty twenty. The world looked a little different, right. There was a sense that
maybe if Democrats, though we were, weren't warned. I want to say this because I think it's important we were warned by certain experts in authoritarianism that Democrats would not be able to just pretend that things were normal and go back to norms and that it would all work like that, But they tried, and I think that appointing Merrick Garland, Biden was trying to say, you know, here's
a guy who was a judge. Just talk us through what you think Biden was doing by putting Merrick Garland on the job and then subsequently what he was doing by picking her.
I think that's a great place to start, because there's a lot to be said, and there's a lot that has been said about her report itself, but it's useful, I think, to pull back the camera to it's a secondary issue, but a really important one, and in many
ways maybe the bigger issue. So I think think that in picking Merrick Garland, Joe Biden was doing frankly what he said he was doing, which is he viewsed the Department of Justice as apolitical and its individual charging decisions would be made independently of the White House, and they
need to be made independently of the White House. You know, there was as a break from the sort of unitary executive why but precisely because it's not appropriate to have Donald Trump when he was president saying let's go after Democrats and not go after Republicans. You know, I want them to not charge my friends. I want them to dismiss those cases. I mean, so this was a way to say, you know what, who's going to have more integrity than somebody who has years ago been in the department.
So he's aware of how it works. But he's been a very respected judge for over twenty years the DC Circuit, and you know, by all accounts, is an honorable, good person, and I think nothing that's happened in any way make me doubt any of that in terms of his being acting in good faith and being a brilliant, smart, lovely, thoughtful,
empathetic person as you can tell. But I do have a butt coming, right, which is that I think that the appointment that where you say, in order to investigate Democrats, you need to have a Republican appointed as a prosecutor, a lah Ken Starr, right, And the idea is like, it's a Republican who is looking into Hunter Biden, but by the same time, it's a Republican who's looking into
Mike Pence. So it's like Republicans investigate republicans, and republicans investcape democrats, and it's republicans who investigate republicans because you would be subject to attack if you've had a Democrat there, but you have a Republican, investigate democrats because if you appointed a Democrat and you would say, oh, they're going to pull their punches. So no matter what you had,
America on appointing Republicans for all of these things. I think that that sort of taking the easy road up front of Oh, I don't want to have an attack on me for doing this. I want to show that I'm bending over backwards buys into one that's a political decision, a small p political decision, and you're there precisely because you weren't supposed to take politics into account. If you are picking the best person for the job. Come on, you think all three of those people just happened to
be the best person for the job. I mean, it's like what Bush said about Clarence Thomas. I mean, come on, by the way, I'm not saying that you shouldn't consider race and the apployment to the Supreme Court. I think you should. I just don't think you should deny it.
And so here I think you're buying into the idea that people don't act out of principle, and it was an overreaction to the attack on Muller and his team, of which you know, as you said, I was one, and is the kind of thing that I think missed an an opportunity to educate the public about why you're not going to be looking at the party politics as somebody that it's irrelevant in the department. I understand why he did it. I just think it was the wrong decision.
And I would say that, by the way, even if I thought that her report was flawless. It's just you are buying into the idea that people cannot be impartial. And you know what, Judges can be impartial, Jurors can be impartial, prosecutors can be impartial, and so you don't sit there and pick a jury by saying, oh, listen, it's a Republican on trial. So, by the way, all of you have to be Republicans, you right, right.
The thing is democrats playing by these twenty twelve rules. The assumption here is that her will not be a partisan, that her will go into this committed to the truth and I think this is true. And you tell me if you think this is true when you read the report, and I thought Joe Scarborough some so succinctly. He couldn't indict him legally, so he indicted him politically. There's so much editorializing, and so the reality is he's not there
to talk about what he thinks about Joe Biden. Neurologically, he just isn't.
I agree, And I think there are two ways to look at what Rob Herd did. I think in terms of the substance of what he found, it was presented in a way that I thought was misleading.
Will you talk about that a little more? Yeah.
So Ryan Goodman, who's a professor at NYU, with me, we write a piece for Just Security. He's one of the managing editors of it. It's a legal forum that's really terrific as wonderful pieces on the website. So we did a piece on Saturday where one of the things we did is posited another way. The introduction could have been written that would have been very clear as to what it was finding and what it wasn't finding. What
we were reacting to was that in the news. I won't say uniformly, but major outlets reported that Rob Hurr found that Joseph Biden had in fact committed a felony, but that they were not recommending prosecution because of discretionary reasons like his age or his memory.
I mean, this is what somebody transmitted to Trump, which made him so furious because he was like, well, then they shouldn't prosecute.
Me either, right, So that is not what he found. And we cite over and over again the passages from this four hundred page plus report, but the introduction was particularly inept in the way it was done or intentionally misleading. I'm not going to speculate about the intent for it. I'm just saying that one of the things we did in our piece was we wrote a different way the introduction could have been written that would have been one hundred percent accurate and would have been very very clear
that there was evidence to open the case. Because of course there was classified documents found where they shouldn't have been, So there's a basis to open the case. But the key issue is knowledge and intent and whether this was wilful, meaning that you had knowledge of the documents, you knew that they were classified, and national defense information, and you knew you were doing something wrong, and over and over and over again, one, two or three of those things
were not present, and over and over again. Her later in the report says that, and he says there are innocent explanations that could not be refuted. I'm paraphrasing, but that's like page six. He says, they're innocent explanations we cannot refute. In fact, he says they're innocent explanations. We found evidence in favor of affirmative evidence to prove. You know what that means as a prosecutor, you cannot go
forward if they're innocent explanations that you cannot refute. That actually means innocence.
Right, right, But it's written in such.
A way that I mean, how about their innocent explanation that are true?
Right?
So that's sort of one aspect which has gone less attention, which is that the report's getting misreported, right.
Right, because reading comprehension is fucking hard. I say this as someone who myself has failed.
And then the second piece, which of course has gone lots of attention, is the embroidery, the sort of James Comy two point zero aspect of this, which is positing what would happen at a trial that's not going to happen, right, You're not going to bring a case, but you're now speculating at that trial, which I'm not going to bring, it is possible that Joseph Biden will testify, which you don't know, and if he testifies, he could say I have a bad memory, which, by the way, is also
irrelevant because what his memory is like today is irrelevant to what his memory was at the time that the documents were found. And by the way, I'm also going to speculate that at this trial that's not happening, where he may testify, but I don't know if you will. I'm going to then say he's going to to say that I do have a bad memory. That was, by the way, disproved within twenty four hours when Joseph Biden,
of course said I don't have a bad memory. So everything about it was so gratuitous it just was not needed. And that's where to go back to your point about I worked on a special counsel investigation just to be slightly in the weeds. Don't worry, I won't be too boring or too long. A special counsel is a person who is part of the Department of Justice. You are not outside of the Department of Justice, and the Special Council Rules require it's not optional. It is required that
you adhere to Department of Justice policies. Nothing about the Special Council Rules exempt you. In fact, the Special Council Rules say you can be fired if you do not follow a Department of Justice guidelines. One of those is that you do not denigrate people if you are not charging them. I'm just giving paraphrasing it. In fact, you know you can't denigrate people even if you are charging them.
People have gotten in trouble for bringing an indictment and then giving a press conference where they then start denigrating somebody. That's something you're not supposed to do. Your personal opinion, those kinds of issues you leave aside, and as people have probably heard here listening to this podcast, you speak in court. And so this was just not adhering to the best traditions of the Department. And I guess I would say at the very least, it showed incredibly poor judgment.
And the best example of that is, even if you thought it was appropriate to talk about Joe Biden's memory, that you would choose to talk about his son. I don't just don't know how that's relevant, even if you thought it was relevant. I know, there's even if you could cobble together some convoluted, fanciful theory that you would choose that example tells you much more about Rob Her than Joe Biden. It is so classless and shows such
a corese sense of propriety and respect. I mean, it was truly shocking.
You know.
I kept on thinking of constantly saying, like, you know who raised you? I could just see if I did anything like that, my parents calling me up and saying, I don't know who raised you, Like you know, you weren't raised by wolves. That's not appropriate behavior.
It feels like when you read it, I think you were the one who said this, but somebody said or wrote that part of what it looks like is her trying to have a long future in Trump world, that there are so much gratuitous stuff with that. I mean, do you think that's true?
You know, I don't know what's going on in his head. We certainly have seen instances where people have done that, and it's like a tryout for a senior position in the Justice Department, like the Bill Barr memo, right exactly. I'm not going to go there as to what was running through his head. I just know what's on paper, and I can judge that I don't think one needs to even get to his motivations that. I mean, you can speculate there are certainly ways in which there could
be those improper motivations. But even if it was well intentioned, it was still inappropriate.
It's hard to imagine it's well attention. Now Republicans are incredibly excited and think that they have a sort of great way to stick it to Biden. So they're going to have now hearings where he's going to testify. And will they be able to play the audio? Is there a precedent for playing audio from these interviews. I've never heard it.
But it's hard because I don't think we've seen all that. But I mean, I'm sure there'll be an effort to try and get the transcripts in the audio and to play this on a loop. I have to say my view on that issue, there's sort of the underlying issue of does the president have memory problems that would make it inappropriate or difficult for him to serve I don't really care what Rob Hurr has to say. He's another person.
I mean, that's where people shouldn't buy into giving him any more weight than I don't think people I didn't care what James Comey had to say about Hillary Clinton. We could all make our own judgment. I don't need Rob her or James Comey to tell me that. I
think that's one where I can leave that aside. If there's an issue that either Donald Trump or Joe Biden has as to their fitness in terms of their policies, their character, their memory, their health, whatever it is, they can go ahead and talk about it, and they do. There's some evidence, and that's the way they should deal with it. To my mind, this is not a particular point of interest, but.
Is there a precedent for playing the audio?
I don't know if it's in this exact context, but you can certainly if you were calling somebody, you could and there was audio or there was a transcript, you could try and get that information and then use it. I'm sure there's a transcript of it. And I think the White House is still considering what do because they have to do a classification review. So I think there's going to be more to come on that, but at the very least there would be a transcript, but there could be audio as well.
But the fact that this is being released, I mean, they're like, I think about the Mueller Report, right, And there was a lot of hymning and hawing about the Mueller Report, and then in the end we saw Bill Barr was like, this is too long to read. Don't worry, it's fine. Our guy didn't do anything wrong. Trump World politicized the report, and the way it was released there was just much more sort of couching and partisanship around it.
I sort of almost wondered why Biden World. I mean, I understand why they didn't do more of that, but I wondered if Democrats are like still not meeting the moment here.
Yeah, so one guess what, Molly, I still remember that me too. I actually I read this book about the Mueller investigation and it starts with that. It starts with the moment.
And you were working for Mueller at that point.
Yeah, I was working her Mueller. And I was in a car when I heard about the bar summary, and I just thought that the reports I was hearing over the radio just had to be wrong. Everyone expected that he was just going to release if you wanted to do a summary. We wrote summaries of the report and we thought, oh well we did that, so he can just release those. And of course he wrote his own. And by the way, just just say something positive about
Merrick Ireland. I mean, this is one where if you want to know anytime a summary would be vindicated to say this report vindicates the principle, it would be the rob Her report vindicates Joe Biden. There was no crime there. I mean, it's so similar to Mike Pens whereas Bill Barr spun it the other way when he wrote a purported summary that wasn't I have to say that's to Merrick Garland's credit that he was not trying to do that. He was like, you know what it is, what it is.
I think where you can fault Merrick Ireland is that he does have an obligation if he thinks that it violated DIO rules, he could have pushed back. There would have been political upheaval or that he would have been accused of, you know, trying to change it or and doing it for political reasons. But you know what, that's
why they pay you the big bucks. If you're not doing it for political reasons, and you're doing it because it is gratuitous smirching of someone who is not being charged, that's your job, and the fact that you're going to be falsely accused of doing it for political reasons is not a reason not to do it. That goes very much back to the initial appointment issue, where I think
you know what, pick the best person. And as a friend of mine said in a nutshell, the appointment of Rob Hurr was fundamentally a political decision, a small p not a merit decision. You were not picking the best person for the job. You were trying to find a qualified person who would not get sort of blowback because this person is of the same party as the person being investigated.
Thank you, Andrew, thank you, thank you, thank you.
You're welcome.
FEEDA.
Scotch Cole is a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University and the author of russ Belt Union Blues. While working class voters are turning away from the Democratic Party. Welcome to Fast Politics, Professor scotch Pol.
Thank you, nice to be here, so.
Great to have you. I just really wanted you to come on the podcast to talk a little bit about the Tea Party and how it relates to where we are right now, because I think I feel like we don't spend enough time talking about the sort of we are the United States of Mnesia, and we don't spend enough time talking about just the very recent history.
Right Well, you know, the Tea Party erupted, of course, soon after Barack Obama was elected in two thousand and eight took office in two thousand and nine, along with
the Democratic control of both Houses of Congress. At that time, that kind of trifecta of control for one party was a rare occurrence, and even while Barack Obama was running for office, but certainly after he was elected, with Democrats in control of the federal government, conservative people in the United States were I would say startled and terrified, right And within a very short period of time, the activists among them dressed up in costumes and started running demonstrations
that suggested that the America they believed in was at stake with this presidency, a message amplified by conservative media. So we all know that demonstrations occurred from then on.
My colleagues and I also honed in on the fact that over the next couple of years up to two thousand, regularly meeting local tea party groups, volunteer groups of people protesting Democrats, and the Obama presidency took to the field in the United States, and by twenty eleven, my co author of Vanessa Williamson and I were out in the field in several states to the United States interviewing grassroots activists. We weren't contenting ourselves with a national polls set or
with what national spokespeople on TV said. We were actually talking to the grassroots activists and attending some of their tea party meetings. Those people, older, white, conservative minded people, overwhelmingly were fascinated by Donald Trump. While we were in
the field interview Oh wow. Even then, I can remember one lady saying to me that she was intrigued because grassroots tea partiers were not enthusiastic about Mitt Romney as a possible candidate for the GOP in twenty twelve, and that was the time when Donald Trump was making a name for himself by challenging Barack Obama's birth certificate and his citizenship, and that fascinated some of those grassroots activists.
And I remember thinking at the time, if he were running, he would be a very attractive candidate for these people. Now flash forward over the years, we know that surviving Tea partiers, activists, people who told national posters that they sympathized with the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, and ultimately people elected to Congress, especially after twenty ten, who considered themselves Tea Party supporters, they have been all along and still are if they're alive and are still
in office. They are the core of the most enthusiastic MAGA supporters. And I can say that partly because I continued personally to go into the field and interview very conservative people after Donald Trump was elected and those still meeting. There were still some Tea Parties meeting as late as
twenty seventeen. They were gung ho for Donald Trump. But we also know from national polls in recent years that those who say they were active in the Tea Party you're sympathetic with it, are very exercised about immigration and very supportive of Donald Trump and his attempts to build a wall around America.
I want to go back to what you said a little bit earlier when we were talking about this, because I don't know that I realized exactly the timing on this. They didn't like Mitt Romney because he felt insufficiently I want to say racist, But what was the complaint about Mitt Romney.
Well, I think the accurate term is ethno nationalists because Tea Party people have been and MAGA people still are very exercised about immigration into the United States, particularly by people of non European origin, as well as upset about African Americans gaining political power. This is an ethno nationalist view of the world that you could call racist. I
prefer the eth non nationalist term. But look, Mitt Romney was not satisfactory to Tea partiers for the same reason that all of the people running against Donald Trump in twenty fifteen on that were dispensed by him one after
another and their Republican primaries were not as acceptable. There's a sense that the Republican establishment has not responded over the years, or didn't until recently, until it was trumpified to what are the most intense concerns of grassroots conservatives, and those concerns certainly included putting a stop to immigration, making sure that black political power in and through the Democratic Party does not go too far for some of them,
maybe about half going back to a more traditional family roles and limiting access to abortion and other kinds of rights for women.
Right and birth control goes with that, right.
Yeah, yeah, really a whole set of it. And also just tension out well professional women.
I can't believe we're having this conversation.
Hillary Clinton was in some ways the perfect emblem of that. So, I mean, all of these concerns are kind of piled on top of each other and have created a movement that I think goes in a straight line from the Tea Party to the Maga movement, although the Maga movement includes more younger men than the TEEP originally did. That they think the kind of America they believe in is
being stolen, is being taken away from them. And Donald Trump is admired because he tells it like it is and because he's promising to bring back the real America. And one Tea part of her that I interviewed as late as twenty seventeen, still meeting in his tea party, and when I finally got around to the end of the interview and I said, well, you know, I'm not sure he's really going to build that wall. My interview
is a very very I'm listening. I'm not preaching people, but toward the end of an interview, I will kind of gently he said, it doesn't matter because his heart's the right place. He's trying, and you know, I want to say that there's nothing foolish about that. I think people in general partly make decisions about politicians in terms of whether they're trying, whether they seem to be on
your side, whether they seem to express your value. So I didn't think that there was anything scandalous about what he said or surprising, but that's what he said.
I think that's a really important point, right, that this is not you know, people don't vote for candidates because I mean, they know that politics are not an ATM. When we talk about this group, I always think of this as the kind of America's like, and maybe this is overly optimistic, as America's last gasp before a possible multi racial democracy that we are in the sort of democratic growing pains small day. Do you think that's right
or do you think I'm being overly optimistic? And what supports or doesn't this idea.
I'm teaching a course right now in which we're looking back at that period from the end of the Civil War through the turn of the twentieth century, when a multi racial democracy, or possibilities for it briefly emerged, actually took shape during congressional reconstruction, and then was brutally rolled back and ultimately snuffed out legally for decades. Now I have to hope I'm an old lady now so I won't live to see it that nothing like that could happen.
Now things move faster, but we are definitely in a period where outright reversal, not just stopping progress toward a multiracial democracy, but outright reversal of the rule of law and of participatory accountability for our government is at stake. And that's because once Donald Trump was elected, and it was a flucal election in many ways, a lot of things had to come together to give him that minority when through the Electoral College in twenty sixteen. From then on,
it's not just Donald Trump, is it. It's an entire political party that has bought into even the most extreme Harvard graduates, like a least Deefonic, are suggesting that we should have what amounts to a dictatorship in this country. There are a lot of people now invested in the project of holding minority authoritarian power and exercising it with
cruelty and fierceness against those who are opposed. And that has happened in US history before, it has happened in many countries' histories before, it could happen here.
Yeah, I'm struck by what you're saying, because it does seem Trump was just Trump, right, he was not the party until systematically he and his people basically removed everyone who wasn't him. I think you saw it really in this most recent primary contest, right, You did see DeSantis ran as mini Trump, and I actually was more anxious about DeSantis because I felt like DeSantis had taken the
scary authoritarianism that is trump Ism, but was also much smarter. Ultimately, Trump's people were attached to him in a way that couldn't be transferred to DeSantis. Is that a good sign? Or am I just being optimistic to be optimistic.
DeSantis, I don't know how smart he is and an unlikable and non entertaining person if there ever was one, and I would not argue that he embraced all of trump Ism. I think this whole anti Dei thing is a middle class version of trump Ism. It's people who attended colleges and felt like they weren't in the mainstream, you know, at the Stephonics stands up for that to thinking that the fight over Harvard is the I don't think ordinary grassroots Trump supporters are all that interested in
that battle. I think they are much more interested in blocking immigration, in carrying through kind of the use of government power to regulate what they would like to see as the ability to win elections by real Americans, which they think of themselves as, and getting back at those who they feel have dissed them, who have taken the reigns of cultural and economic dynamism in this country and
pass them by. Remember, people who were overwhelmed for Trump and therefore living communities where everybody likes Trump are exurban to not so much rural as small town. There's a sharp geographic divide. And of course those are areas that have a lot of extra leverage in the electoral College, the Senate, and in gerrymandered legislatures.
So those are the states with not a lot of electoral votes.
Well, they're also the people who are beyond the circle of counties around Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, which I've studied closely. You know, they're very competitive.
I mean, they captured.
Both in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan in twenty sixteen, and Joe Biden only kind of inched his way back to better margins in some of those outlying areas. It starts right at the edge of the inner ring of suburbs around the metropolitan in every state.
Is it right to believe, not morally right, but correct to believe that what is happening in this country is a divide largely not always true, but that people who are more educated tend to be Democrats and people who are less educated tend to be Republicans, with the exception of the very wealthy.
Well, both parties are cross income and cross to a lesser degree cross educational credential coalitions. The Democrats are a coalition of college educated, with more and more college educated who used to be moderate Republicans moving toward the Democrats, especially in dynamic metro Politan areas. But they are also dependent on a constituency of lower income people of color who live in the cities, and those people are drifting
away to some degree. The Republicans are a coalition of I would say small business type people, construction type people, middle class people in more religious areas, more right wing religious areas of the country, and a fair number of blue collar workers. Although I think our tendency to think of all Trumpers as non college educated is not quite right. It's right overall, but there are a lot of college educated people that are bought into this.
Which is a terrifying sentence in itself. Right, talk to me about the dependency Democrats have on these lower income voters and why they're leaving the Democratic Party.
Well, I think some of the men among them are tempted, but let's think about it. I mean, the Democrats have been and there's a new paper out by Jacob Packer and Paul Pearson that really does a brilliant job of showing that the Democratic Coalition has been reinvented recently among using government spending pretty aggressively to both address concerns that college educated voters have, like the environment, and to try to deal with some of the lower income people's needs,
particularly their needs for family supports. So the Democratic Party is not they're not AOC, but they've put together a more progressive economic program that speaks to the needs of a very broad cross class coalition in the metropolitan areas. The trouble is the Republicans have enough power to block a lot of that. And if you look at not just what happens in a lot of state legislatures, but
look at what happened with Build Back Better. It started out with a really bold redistributive, that is, equality enhancing set of proposals, and as it finally made it through, a lot of the things like the Chin tax Credit, which had reduced poverty enormously, were stripped away, partly because of Republicans and partly because of Joe Manchin. If you can't deliver, if you promise and you can't deliver, which
is the Democrat's dilemma. They can get to fifty to fifty, but they can't quite get enough federal power to deliver, and they've lost the courts. That is something that Trump rives on. Trump thrives on the idea that appeals to many non college people that oh, if just a powerful president would just cut through all this nonsense and just do things. And of course Trump will promise anything to anybody.
He will in this election. He's going to promise everything, and a lot of people don't even pay attention till the last minute. And of course the media system completely magnifies everything Trump says while mainly broadcasting legal cases that the college educated people are following, which really turn off the color people. I mean, they're just not interested in whether the fourteenth Amendment is officers or come on, you know,
let's face it, that's ridiculous. So Trump rides, I'm not getting things done.
Okay, thank you so much, professor. This was so interesting, and so I hope you will come back.
Sure, let's make sure we don't feel one of the cases that the college educating are following.
No Mo.
Jesse Cannon, Maley, Jong Fast. You know what violence I love.
There's only one type, Crazy Texas Republican on crazy Texas Republican violence the best.
It's worth remembering that as much as Democrats and Republicans have iire between each other, this Republican party really really has a lot of ire. So here we go. Ken Paxton ag You will remember they tried to impeach him once. He is trolling John Cornyan, who again this is like Pexton is Maga maga, So he's mad at John Cornyan for voting to send aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
The thinking here is that sending this humanitarian aid, some of this as military aid, will prevent further conflicts, but it doesn't matter because maga Ken Paxton wants to score the points with the megabase and so he is now declared war on John Cornan. There are no winners here, only losers. 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.