David Axelrod: Change Agent
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Thanks again to Hyundai's amazing EV lineup. Learn more at HyundaiUSA.com or call 562-314-4603. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to be here with a first-time guest on The Daily. It's Chief Strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. He's the founder of the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics.

You might see him on CNN, and he's the host of two podcasts, The Competitor, Hacks on Tap, and The Axe Files with David Axelrod. Hey, David. How you doing, man? The Bulwark podcast has no competitors. You know that. We love hacks. You've been cheating on me with Sarah Longwell and Bill Kristol for a while now. So it's about time we get a little FaceTime, I figure. Yes, yeah. They are brilliant. The whole operation is great.

And happy to be with you as well. Much appreciated. So we've got a lot of seriousness to discuss. We've got some bedwetting to discuss. But I figured we'd start with some laughs, if that's okay, at Trump's expense. I enjoy that. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. It is, but...

I got to find pleasure somewhere these days. Okay. All right. Go ahead. Knock yourself out. The former president went on the flagrant podcast with a comedian named Andrew Schultz. There was some laughing. I think it was kind of in the at, not with variety, but let's listen to a couple of my favorite highlights.

I have a hard time doing it to them because I'm basically a truthful person. But frankly, Dwight Eisenhower was sort of a moderate, General Eisenhower. Did you know that they had 8% generals, president of the United States, 8% were generals, 92% were politicians, and then you had Trump.

See, that's a weave. You know, we go off and just... I like that. Because now I'm like, where are we weaving to? I'm into this. No, no, think of it. Because we're talking about generals, and then you get back on to the general. There you go. Because what I was going to say...

is that Eisenhower is a moderate. I like the play-by-play for the week. No, it's good, though. Isn't it great? We go into it, we mention Eisenhower, and then I say, he was a general, 8% generals, 92%, and now you go back, okay? It's part of the weave, you know? Then you go back. No, you've got to keep it all together. You've got to be sharp. If you're not sharp, you're dead. You've got to be sharp. Think of it. Think of it.

You got to be sharp, Axe. How sharp did that sound to you? And if you're not sharp, you're dead. If you're not sharp, you're dead. So we better be sharp because I don't want to be dead. You're feeling sharp. The mental acuity there, how are we feeling on the mental acuity scale for the 78-year-old wannabe president again? You know, I mean, the truth of the matter is I went back and looked, you know, when I was getting ready for his debate with Biden.

Biden, I went back and looked at the 2016 debate, and it was pretty striking. He was different. I mean, there's always been this sort of strange turns, but they generally go in a direction. And he is not what he was then. These rallies are mind-boggling when you listen to them, these two hours of stand-up that he does.

Because it's just like words flow. You know, when the first Mayor Daley was mayor of Chicago, he's famous for his malapropisms. And his press secretary once screamed at the reporters who were covering him and said, don't print what he said, print what he meant. And Mike Royko once said about the old Mayor Daley that he never exits the same sentence he enters. But that's sort of become the norm here.

Trump starts a sentence. I guess that has double meaning these days, but Trump starts a sentence and he, you never know where he's going to wind up. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't pull this clip, but there's audio from the rally last night, the Pennsylvania rally, which I suffered through a prime example. This is like, he starts talking about the hurricane.

And it's in North Carolina. And then he goes to like, but then FEMA didn't come, which is a lie. So he starts with a lie. And then he builds on the lie by saying, but it shouldn't have been a problem because there's so many military bases in North Carolina. There should have already been people on the ground. And then that takes him to, by the way, we should give Fort Bragg its Confederate name back. And then he does a long aside on the Confederate and the Wokes and taking changing names. And it's like, so you start on this extremely serious topic.

And you just advance a total conspiracy about it and then get derailed into talking about Confederate names. Yeah. But, you know, Tim, let me just say, just stepping back, going back to that example about Mayor Daley, people actually did know what he meant. And in some ways, when Trump talks to his base, they somehow know what he means. I mean, he's communicating things that may not be linear, but they're visceral.

And, you know, we shouldn't underestimate the power of that. The stuff he's done on the hurricane is abysmal, just as the kind of victimization of Springfield, Ohio was abysmal and so on. But they're, you know, all for a purpose. I'm always reminding myself of what Alyssa Farrah Griffin, my colleague over at CNN, said who worked for him in communications.

She said he once told her he wanted her to say something. She said, well, that's not true. He said, if you say it enough, they'll believe it. The George Costanza. Yeah, that's his. I think it's more Roy Cohn. But, you know, that's how he operates. And, you know, the essence of Trump is that his father told him when he was a kid that he reportedly that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are killers and there are losers.

And you got to be a killer. You can't be a loser. And the subtext of that is the world is the hunger games. The world's a jungle. The strong take what they want. The weak fall away. And rules and laws and norms and institutions, those are for suckers. So just do whatever you have to do. And that's sort of the way he's lived his life. And now the whole country's being tugged along with him. But that's a...

Hell of a way for, you know, a president of the United States to think. Yeah, that fundamentally is just not how government works, right? This is why he, I think, is so uniquely dangerous, even against some of these other guys. Like, on the hurricane point, I was watching this morning before we started taping the DeSantis' press conference, you know, kind of updating people on Milton. And obviously there's some terrible...

that's being done that seems not to be as bad as kind of what people had feared, the worst fears and expectations. And DeSantis is giving a very kind of meticulous rundown of like, here's what we know, here's what happens, here's the areas where things are worse, here's where we're sending resources. DeSantis meets with Biden yesterday. And like all this stuff that is just for everything that there is to hate about DeSantis, and there's plenty, like it's just within the normal bounds of what a politician is supposed to do when there's a crisis, when there's a tragedy. And like Trump is just fantasizing

fundamentally incapable of it. Because if you have that killers or losers mindset, there's no room there for, well, we got to work with the other guys on this one to actually solve a problem. I think, Tim, what you're saying right there is potentially why he still may lose this election. I keep saying one of the things that struck me about that vice presidential debate, which was

wholly unremarkable in many ways was the degree to which there was a dial group that a super PAC did of this debate. And after they had a discussion and in that group, this was swing voters who were normally pretty ornery group at this stage in an election. And they were like rapturous. They were...

That was the greatest debate we've seen. They were courteous. They were civil. Too civil for my taste. I was out of step with the swing voters on this one. I was like, rip his face off, Tim. No, no, I know. I know. There was a lot of that. I've heard a lot of that. My point is this, though. I think there's a hunger out there for something else. There is an understanding that if

You are in a constant state of pugilism and you are going to demonize your opponents at every turn and you're trying to weaponize every problem. You're not going to solve anything. You're not going to get anything done. If I were her, I would be leaning into more of that. I think that's a real problem.

tangible vulnerability. I mean, Trump has a lot of vulnerabilities. And I think it's frustrating to a lot of people who understand them or feel them that he's not getting held more accountable for them, not the least of which is fundamentally trying to overturn a free and fair election.

But this one, I think, has a practical, tangible application, which is, you know, all that stuff that you think we need to get done, we're never going to get it done with this guy because he's so consumed by himself and so consumed by his battles, most of which are completely unnecessary, that he's not going to be able to do this. That's the turn of the page. That's what makes him the incumbent in this race. And if this race is about...

turning the page on Biden and his policies. And remember, we're in an environment in which 25, 28 percent of people say we're on the right track. Whether that's fair or not, that's the reality. Normally, the incumbent party loses that election. So she has to make change from that, from that element of Trump, I think, a focus of her closing arguments.

Is that your top advice for her? And if you if they I mean, I'm sure I know that you're talking to your old buddy Plouffe and some of those folks, but and I'm sure they're, you know, taking some of the things that that you guys have been discussing in private, but is there something that they haven't done at this point that you would like to see more of over the last four weeks?

I don't talk to them that much because I know what it's like to be on the inside and have, you know, old duffers outside telling you what to do. Sometimes it's nice to be here from outside the bunker, though. We learned earlier this summer there are some problems in the bunker sometimes. Well, I agree. But that's...

entirely up to them to decide what they need. And I think when you look at the rollout from the moment she announced she was running to, you know, the sort of lightning strike to seize the nomination, her appearances after the rallies, the convention, which was a remarkable thing, having turned that around in weeks from a Biden convention to a Harris convention. And

And then the debate. And then for 10 days after the debate, I think she benefited from the aftermath of that debate as social media carried the message of what happened that night. But things kind of have stalled out now. And, you know, you need a closing statement.

in this drama. And you have to think hard about what that closing argument is. That's number one. Number two is I agree with the strategy to get her out. Obviously, she needs to be disciplined. It's hard. She needs to be disciplined and organic in these appearances. And I think that's

which is a hard thing to ask of people. Great advice, boss. You've got to be authentic and guarded. Yeah, just spin this plate and rub your belly on roller skates. You've got to be charming and strong. Hey, man, running for president is hard. But you need to internalize your message and you need to react in organic ways when you're talking to folks. But one of the things that says to me that she hasn't entirely –

internalize the strategic elements of the campaign and where it's at is the answer on the view about what she would do differently from Biden. They're like, you're a professional, Tim. There are many, many ways she could have answered that question without looking like she was running away from Biden. But the answer she gave was uniquely bad. Yeah.

So, you know, there is that, you know, she needs to be internalized what the strategic imperatives are, but more interaction with actual people. I think I've seen some footage of her talking to just people who come up to her, people who have problems, people and her whole being sort of changes. And it's really, I think, impactful. So I'm saying more of that.

You know, but in messaging wise, I think you do need to sort of set the stakes here. You know, if you care about getting this done for the middle class, if you care about the things that she has been stressing and that people want, you know, you ask yourself, how are we going to get this done if we can't even talk to each other? And then stress the element of Trump's sort of unremitting commitment.

sort of self-consumption, you know, or self-absorption, you know, it's all about him all the time.

So, I mean, I'd be stressing those things. It seems like the change thing is what you're really concerned about, like making sure she's positioned as the change person, which she was doing well at the very beginning. Yes. Turn the page on all of this politics, this brain-dead politics that doesn't let us get things done. And, you know, honestly, on that Biden answer, the thing I would have said is, look, I'm grateful to have served him.

I'm grateful to have had the opportunity. I'm proud of him. And, you know, obviously I'm running for president because I have my own ideas about where we should go from here. We'll build on some of the things he's done. We'll do some things differently. But one thing I admire that I do want to emulate is he understood that if you're going to get stuff done, you got to be able to work with people. We got an infrastructure bill.

Because Republicans and Democrats were willing to work together, the president being part of that process. We didn't get that under Donald Trump. There's a reason for that. We got this done. We got that done. And then I guess the last element, Tim, is part of that mix is Trump does...

He offers himself as a tribune of the forgotten middle class, but he governs in a very traditional way. And I mean, Republicans have a different view on this, but his one major achievement was that big tax cut that skewed in one direction. He wants to do away with the Affordable Care Act. You know, there are a lot of things that he would do.

that don't square with the idea that he's a tribune of the working man, you know? So the advice you have there, I don't know if you, and you've been talking to our buddy, Jay Marta Politico, but it is kind of in line. Jay Marta is this morning has a piece that says that she should be embracing the probability that she has a GOP Senate vow compromise, taking temps down, getting shit done is, I mean, that's kind of insidery to care about the Senate, but it is like when I talk to my on the fence, uh,

The small group of swing voters that are the former Republicans, college educated, don't like Trump, are worried about Kamala, that the real Kamala might be too far left. I look at them and say, look, the Senate is gone, right? I mean, the Montana Senate polls has New York Times has she plus eight, Remington, she plus eight, Fabrizio, she plus six, public opinion, she plus six. And so if the Democrats can't win Montana,

They can't win the Senate. And if they can't win the Senate, they can't do any of the socialist stuff you're scared of. So can you use that to pivot to the center? And what they should be worried about is that if Trump wins and manages to carry the House with him and the Senate, you know, where's the guardrails? None.

Supreme Court, 6-3 Supreme Court, three Trump appointees. Yeah, and I would expect that he might get a chance to make other appointments because I think there'll be a couple of them who may quit and give him the opportunity to do that. It still would be the same configuration, but you'd have a new generation of...

some of the same. So I think that now they have to sharpen their closing argument and it has to be consistent and it has to be carried in media. And I'm sure they're thinking about that. Where are you at on the bedwetting scale?

here as just as far as things are going i mean let me look down yeah i mean are you in a puddle right now it's all dry here it's all dry okay that's not not true over here in new orleans i'm in a puddle and it isn't a storm for once it's it's my own uh it's yeah it's it's my own make-do rating let me just say we are ill sir i think the vibe right now

isn't great. There's concern. But partly we have this plethora of polls and they all say something slightly different. So, you know, if she's two points up in one poll,

in a state and another poll comes out and says she's a point down, that is around a bedwetting and so on. I'm not minimizing the fact that I do think she stalled out about 10 days after the debate. I kind of think the war was a circuit breaker there and kind of because I don't think that's

People started thinking about the commander in chief thing and there were some other things. And I have to say that the Trump campaign has been very, very, while he's undisciplined, they are very disciplined in their media and their media is designed to cast her as A, a continuation of Biden's economics and B, an exotic left wing person.

Radical. Worse than exotic, really. Right. Queer, loving, non-binary, loving radical is going to change your kid's gender. They have been burning that message in.

And I think that's had some impact as well. So, you know, is it right to be concerned? It's right to be concerned. This is a very, very close race, though. I mean, the reality of the race is you're talking about virtual ties in almost all the battleground states. Now, the question that plays in people's minds is, does Trump produce what he has in the past, which is

you know, hidden vote that comes out at the end. So is a tie actually a win for him? That's, I think, what a lot of Republicans assume. I think a lot of Democrats fear it. I don't know. I mean, polling has been refined. His number generally is around where his number has been

In the final analysis. So it makes me think that polling has refined itself. I don't think there are shy Trump voters out there anymore. Trump voters are anything but shy. You know, I was with Rove last night and he argues that there may be shy voters.

anti-Trump voters. Rove might be a shy Harris voter. You might have been with a shy Harris voter. He did not reveal that to me. He won't come on the podcast, which makes me think he might be a shy. He doesn't want to admit that he's not a shy Harris voter because he knows where I'm going if I get him on. Maybe he's a shy bulwark listener. Hey, Carl. But I mean, my point is, you know, we don't really know, but it would be more comfortable if

Biden had a big lead at this point in polling. He ended up winning by 44,000 votes over three states. Hillary had a big lead at this moment, and she ended up losing the battleground states by narrow margins. So forging a bit of a lead would give people comfort and everybody would dry out. But I don't know that we're going to have that.

There's some scuttle out there that like the Dem private numbers are actually worse than the public numbers. Do you hear that? You know, I'll tell you something. I think that there are all kinds of numbers out there. Right. I mean, I've been watching one set of numbers, just a rolling track that for months, I think they reflect what I said, which is she was making steady progress until about 10 days after the debate. And it kind of leveled off.

but it leveled off in a place where everything's sort of tied. There's no steep decline. The day before Joe Biden dropped out, Trump was headed to a landslide. That's not where we are right now. This is a very winnable race, but I think that she's going to have to do a little bit more to make the sale, and events are going to have an impact on it. I think that minor changes in the environment

can make a difference in this race. So it's fine to be concerned. It's a mistake to be fatalistic about this. I don't think this race is over by any stretch of the imagination. No, I'm not fatalistic. I'm just breathing into a paper bag. Concerned is where I am.

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I worry that we're biased at the Bulwark in analysis of kind of wanting Dems to reach out to our people because we know our people. And the Harris campaign has really been doing a lot. She's got a new ad out that I saw you tweeted the other day that is like directly aimed at our folks. ♪

100 Republicans who worked in national security for Presidents Reagan, both Bushes and for President Trump, now endorsing Harris for president. She came up as a prosecutor, an attorney general into the Senate. She has the kind of character that's gonna be necessary in the presidency.

Vice President Harris is standing in the breach at a critical moment in our nation's history. We have a shared commitment as Americans to do what's right for this country. This year, I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. Former generals, secretaries of defense, secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, CIA directors, and National Security Council leaders,

under Democratic and Republican presidents, Republican members of Congress, and even former Trump administration officials agree there's only one candidate fit to lead our nation, and that's Kamala Harris. I'm Kamala Harris, and I approve this message.

There was a Wisconsin Marquette poll that jumped out at me. It said a large majority of undecided voters in the state describe themselves as moderates. In partisan terms, Republicans and Republican-leading independents make up the single biggest group, about half the undecideds, followed by pure independents, 40%, and Democrats and Democratic-leading independents, only 10%. To me, that must be what they're seeing, right? That's why there's so much Liz Cheney, because I hear from my lefty friends, maybe dial back to Liz Cheney a little bit.

Where do you fall on that? I think there's that. I think they're trying to create a permission structure for these, you know, Haley Republicans. But I also think that it came after that war erupted. And I do think that it was a direct answer to the whole commander in chief thing and strength thing. You know, it featured Stan McChrystal, who was the commander in Afghanistan and played a big role in Iraq.

So I think it was on a macro level meant to deal with that issue. On a micro level, you know, I think to reach out to those Republican-leaning independents for whom national security is a big issue. And Liz Cheney does speak to those people. Coalitions are a bitch, man. They're hard to manage.

Can I say that these days? Yeah, you can say it. Certainly on the Bulwark podcast. Maybe not on Crooked Media. I don't know. They might have different staffers over there, different concerns. We can say it's a bitch over here. Charles Franklin is the pollster's name. I want to shout him out because he does good work. I just want to verbalize the worry that people have, which is not my worry. I think this is correct. I think what the Harris team is doing is correct, and I think that they're looking at data, and the data is just that like –

High income, high education, former Republicans are like the people left on the tree that they can still squeeze the juice that's left to squeeze. But some people say it's like it feels Hillary ish, you know, that Hillary ish. Hillary tried this and they lost. Listen, I think their biggest problem, Tim, is not that. I think their biggest problem is that.

They're still lagging a bit among African-Americans, and there's a concern about that, both those numbers in turn. So that's unlike, so why so much less change? Are there other stuff? Should she be doing other, is there other type of messaging that might appeal to that demo? Well, there's no question, although, I mean, I don't think the voters who are hanging out, and not just black voters or Hispanic voters, but younger voters and some

kind of working class voters. I don't think they're watching TV ads particularly. I don't think they're, I mean, they're probably getting a lot more on social media. TV ads are for the 65-year-old former Republican types that are still watching the nightly news. You know, they're still watching terrestrial cable. Yeah. I mean, I think that there's some of

There's some of that. They're doing, I'm sure, a lot of stuff to micro-target those. And frankly, President Obama getting out there today in Pittsburgh, and this will be the start of a campaign presence for him. He can be very helpful with some of the voters who they need to consolidate here, but who are much more influenced, by the way, by economic issues than by these issues.

So don't assume that their whole messaging is aimed at you. Well, they don't need to aim it at me. I'm one over. But, you know, my people, my people writ large. Your people, yeah. Yeah.

Well, you're responsible for them. I know. And we're doing everything. We're out there. This is a good plug, Axe. We got a bus tour next week. We're doing Philly, Pittsburgh, Detroit. We got all the Never Trumper stars. Go to theblork.com slash events. Come hang out with us. George Conway will be out there. We got some regular Pennsylvanian and Michigan former Republicans voting for Kamala. So it'll be a good little circuit.

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protect yourself with a 30-day free trial at lifelock.com. Use promo code news. Terms apply. You mentioned your former boss is out today. We got you here. So I want to do a little, you know, looking back. But before we get to that, there's one more clip from that podcast I want to play that I think is interesting thinking in the context of your former boss. Let's listen to Trump talking about what he thinks about America.

My legacy to be is the same as the term MAGA, make America great again. I'm going to make this country great again. It's not a great country right now. It's loaded up. It's always a great country. It's a great country. See, that's why I disagree. It's always a great country. Okay, but... Good on that comedian. It's always a great country. Yeah. And then you hear Trump under his breath if you couldn't hear it. That's where I disagree. Yeah. Could you imagine what would have happened if your former boss had done that? Well...

That was a big meme, right, about him that he, you know, not only was he not an American, but he hated America. You heard that a lot from Rush Limbaugh and others, including, you know, Trump obviously was a propagator of the whole birther thing. Yeah, listen, I said this to a group last night. My father was a refugee from Eastern Europe, Jewish refugee, and suffered terrible, terrible

violence and deprivations and so on. And he and his family struggled to get here when he was a child. And one generation later, I was the senior advisor to the president of the United States. You know, this isn't a perfect country, but this is a great country. We should always want to make it greater. We should always strive to make it more perfect and

But the freedom that we have here, the opportunities, we should work to broaden. And certainly, why is it that people all over the world want to come here? You know, I know that Trump thinks that's bad. I think it's good.

I think it's good that this is a country that people look up to, that people want to come to, that people want to come and contribute to. You know, I'd like to think my family was one of those families that came here and contributed to this country. So I would think people should find that deeply, deeply offensive. I mean, the truth of the matter is Donald Trump thinks that no country is great that he isn't president of.

And that's how he judges whether a country is great. Instantly, instantly, instantly, if he were to get elected again on January 21st, America would be great again in his telling. You know, this is bigger than Donald F and Trump. OK, I think one of the things that should concern people is that kind of perverse worldview that

But Josh Shapiro's line about why don't they stop shit-talking America, it really speaks to the larger thing, which is there is nothing, no principle, no value that Trump is unwilling to subjugate for his own political needs. He wants to, you know, weaponize every problem. The fact that they didn't pass that immigration bill last year because he said, no, we want the issue, was a parable about who he is.

Sorry, you set me off there. No, let's do it. I love setting you off because it sets me off. I watch this and it makes me very upset. And listening to you talk about your father's story, and it is the fundamentalist American story, and that's why Donald Trump is fundamentally un-American. I think my favorite line of Obama's

was in the unlikely story that it is America, there's nothing false about hope. I find myself saying that sometimes, sometimes tongue in cheek, but also sometimes earnestly. Yeah. I'll tell you something. When he got the call to give the convention speech in 2004, the keynote address, he hung up the phone and he said, I know what I want to say. And I said, well, what is it that you want to say? He said, I want to talk about

My story is part of the larger American story. And he did. And it's something that he believed. He carried that in his heart. And in that sense, he was the most American of presidents because he believed that

In the greatness of America, even as he recognized where America had fallen short and where we could do better. Do you have a favorite Obama line? And did did you write it? Your favorite one you didn't write? No. The thing about that particular speech is that he he did write that speech. I think it's the greatest speech he ever gave.

And he's given a lot of good speeches. And we had a lot of great speechwriters. And, you know, the best time of my White House tenure was the hour a day I spent leading the speechwriters meeting because it was the greatest writers room you could ever imagine. But he was the best speechwriter in the group. And that speech was pure Obama. And I used to say to the speechwriters,

That's the founding document. You know, if you find yourself getting lost, go back and read that because that's what this is all about. So I don't know. There are so many lines that I loved and appreciated. But, you know, the line that gave me.

chills in some ways was and the purest joy that I experienced in that whole journey with Obama politically, I mean the passing the Affordable Care Act to me was personal and because I have a child with chronic illness, but politically the most joyful experience was the Iowa caucuses in 2008 and When he came out on that stage and they said they said this day would never come It just sent chills down my spine

Because it meant so much about our country. You know, here he had won the caucuses in a state that was overwhelmingly white and they had embraced him. It was so moving to me. That whole night was amazing.

so moving to me. But, you know, we could do a whole show on him and his rhetoric. Let's do that, hopefully, next year, if Trump loses. The bulwark may be out of business. The bulwark, you may be broadcasting from Toronto. Then we'd have nothing but time. And I'm going south, baby. I'm going south. I'm not going up to the cold. Stuart Stevens offered me his place in Quebec City, and I was like...

Yeah, I was like, no, Quebec City for me. I'm going to be down in Montevideo or something, hiding out. I have a little bone to pick with you. One serious note on this. Just listening to this, you're getting me emotional. Thinking about Obama. Thinking about what he meant to the American story. And then thinking about Trump and how just fundamentally at odds he is with it. And how fucking cruel he was. And how just negligent he was.

in his attacks on Obama and in the way that he was president, the way that he acted as president.

I feel like sometimes we're the most pissed than ever Trumpers at the people that go around to go along with them. And sometimes I, I don't know. I'm like, I don't know how you do it on the CNN panel. Sometimes I'm looking at you and I just want to grab Scott Jennings by his lapel, throw him down, throw down. And I do feel like you have a little bit more of a Zen to you, a little more of a call. Can you explain that to me? Why you don't have rage? Why you don't have my rage?

You know, you're not the first person. I remember David Frum was at my Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, where you should come sometime. I walked into the conference room and the first thing he said to me is, why are you so calm? Yeah. You know, you can hear I'm not calm in the sense that I love this country for what it truly is. And I think there's so much at stake here.

But I also think that one thing that's at stake is our ability to talk to each other. And the truth of the matter is Scott Jennings is a really good friend of mine. You know, I don't agree with him. And I think he's playing a particular role right now that... It's pernicious, a pernicious role. Well, I mean, certainly he's playing a partisan role at a time when, you know, I think it's

You have to stretch yourself to do that and feel good about it. But I know him as a human being. I know what he is as a father. I know his whole story. I know how he treats people.

I hear a lot about him. But my view is I want to have conversations with people. So when I challenge him, it's in the spirit of I'm not trying to impeach you as a human being. I'm not trying to impeach you as an American, but I'm going to challenge what you say. The thing about Trump is.

There is something called Trump derangement syndrome, but it's an understandable thing because he ratchets things up so high that we respond to his outrage with our outrage and we ratchet it up to the point where we're in our silos and they're in their silos. But isn't our outrage righteous though? Isn't there a difference between righteous outrage and fake bullshit outrage? Yes.

The outrage we have is about fake bullshit outrage. But the point is, Tim, we can, and it goes to our earlier discussion, I kind of try and look for the best in people and, you know, and I, you know, try and relate to that.

and try and work through differences. And I don't know how we survive, honestly, as a democracy. I mean, obviously, we can't survive as a democracy if we look away from gross trespasses of democracy. Let's just stipulate that point. And I understand the outrage about

people who know better, who are willing to look aside at the truth. And I think that's what you're speaking about. But it's also true. I mean, I have conversations with people who are voting for Trump and I have conversations with people who are voting for Harris. I live sometimes in the rural Midwest. I've got neighbors who are good neighbors and good people who are voting for Trump for a variety of reasons, mostly because they don't think they count.

And he's like a big middle finger to the people they think are disdainful of them. Totally. He's not disdainful of them at all. He cares about them very deeply. Average rural Illinois people. Yeah. Well, of course. But what he is is a big middle finger to the people who they think disdain them. I think we have to find our way back to a point where we can have good faith differences. Listen, you come from a different partisan tradition than I do.

We could probably find things that we disagree on, but I don't demean you for it. For sure. The hard part is this issue of democracy. And I think that is where I choose to plant my flag when we have these arguments on television and so on, which is, you know, when you, you, Scott talked about Waltz being deceptive because he was in Hong Kong or China two months after he said he was.

You can't compare that to a guy saying that the election was stolen and turning a whole country upside down. That's not an honest debate. And I call him on it. And you know that because we saw him on TV that night. I mean, he sounded like me. You know, everyone sounded like everyone. I don't mean to keep picking on Scott. Everyone. They all sounded like me. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Scott Jennings. They all sounded like me and you. Everybody did for three days. So it's not like they didn't know. Yeah, no. And I don't think he would say if he were here, he would not say anything.

Well, I've changed my mind on that. The question is, is that or is that not a serious enough offense that it makes one unacceptable in a position of responsibility in this country? You know, I think, yes, Scott needs to explain why he thinks no, but I'm just, you know, I don't know if I've,

explain myself sufficiently to your satisfaction. Well, no, no, you can't. I mean, Sarah, we do this. I'm sorry, we're going over, but this is important stuff. We struggle with this at the board because we deeply care about norms and conversation and want the country to be fixed and want us to be able to argue about policy disagreements. So that is intention, though, with...

are also like just deep-seated rage at people that are trying to tear the country down that know better or that the people that know better who are going along yeah who are going along with their fellow travelers let me

Yes, and they're doing it for personal political reasons. Very petty reasons. Survival, you know, survival in the environment he's created. And I'm sure if you look at history at some... Yeah, but everybody survives. That's kind of a cop-out though. Anybody that has achieved success in Republican politics who wanted to walk away could go work for a company, could go to... Nobody's putting their food on their table. Nobody's not surviving, you know?

Survival in the game. I had this discussion with Adam Kinzinger, who I really respect. He's on my side of this. Kinzinger, he might be the only one madder than me. He's like full of rage. Oh, no, no. And you know what? He deserves to be because he was willing to say there are bigger things in life than having a title.

I asked him about voting against the first impeachment. He said, that was the worst vote I ever cast. I said, why did you cast it? He said, because it's hard to walk away from the tribe. And he said, and a lot of my colleagues, he said, this is their identity. Being a member of Congress, being a member of the Senate, this is their identity. It's not, to me, it's a job. To them, it's their identity. And they can't imagine themselves not in those jobs.

He wasn't justifying it. I think he's a guy, you know, he's a career military guy. He's a guy who takes his oath seriously. I honor him. I'm proud to call him my friend. And I understand, you know, his feelings. But what he described is what it is. I'm not excusing it. I think that, you know, history is going to be very tough on people who, you know, knew better and went along. But that describes...

90% of the current Republican Party leadership. All right. Well, at some level, I admire it, and I need to find your zen. So if you have any yoga or CBD gummy advice, I will take it. I will say I debated Dan Crenshaw. I'll also be practicing zen in Toronto, so.

Okay, great. I should shout out the Axe Files podcast. You do very interesting long-form conversations with people. That said, I listened to your Dan Crenshaw podcast to prep for a debate I had with Dan Crenshaw that we'll put in the show notes for people that missed it. It wasn't that helpful because your zen versus my rage, maybe it should have been more helpful, actually. Maybe I should have taken a little bit more from your style, but it's hard for me internally. Yeah.

My goal in that podcast, there is a ton of forums in which you can get very intense debates. My goal in that podcast is to, I want people to leave the podcast more aware of who someone is. I want them to learn about who people are, their stories and so on. And I think in that podcast, if you listen to that podcast, you know,

There are places where his discomfort or his inability to sort of square the circle were evident. And people will draw their own conclusions, you know. So my mission on that podcast is a little different. No, you succeeded in your mission. It just didn't help your mission. I was looking for a little gotchas, you know. I was looking for a little gotchas coming to give him a little twist the knife verbally, rhetorically. But we had a spirited exchange, I would say.

Last thing, you don't have the stash anymore. You shaved it for epilepsy. This is what you mentioned earlier, your daughter. So it's a two-part question. Is the stash ever coming back? And do you want to give to our listeners an organization that you raised money for and we can put the link in so you can promote it?

Yes, that's so good of you to ask. No, it will never come back and I'll tell you why. I mean, there's a long story as to how this happened, but we did this thing after the election of 2012 on Morning Joe called Slash the Stash. By the way, the first...

One of the first big contributions came from Donald Trump, because I said on the show, If he watches a lot of cable. He watches Morning Joe, that's for sure. I said, I know you're watching. You said you'd give us $5 million if the president would present his birth certificate. He presented his birth certificate. You never gave us the $5 million. I said, you can at least send me $100,000. And he did send me $100,000 from the now defunct foundation.

So it probably wasn't his money, but I still appreciated it. And then I was able to call Mark Cuban and say, Donald Trump just gave me $100,000. You can't let him outdo you. So he sent $200,000. We ended up raising $1.2 million. I shaved the mustache off. We walk away from this. I did it on national TV.

And my wife says to me, hey, leave that thing off. I always hated it anyway. This was after 33 years of marriage, Tim. So it's like, what else is she not telling me? But yes, the organization is cureepilepsy.org. It started at our kitchen table because our daughter was in agony and we couldn't find any answers. And it became the largest private funder of epilepsy research in the world.

And, you know, we're looking for innovative research that will find cures so that people don't have to put up with the kinds of side effects that you would get from some of these very difficult drugs you have to take to subdue seizures if you have intractable epilepsy or surgeries or other diseases.

treatments. So please, if you're inclined, please send a few bucks to cureepilepsy.org. One in 26 Americans will have epilepsy in their lifetime, and a third of them will have intractable epilepsy. So this is not a small problem, and we welcome all the help we can in solving it. Thank you for your advocacy and your calm and your insight.

David Axelrod. We'll do this again from, I guess, you'll be in Toronto. I'll be in Montevideo. You know what? I'm not getting run out of my country. Me neither. I'm effing staying. I'm effing staying. We'll see you, Val, back here tomorrow for the Friday edition of the Lord Podcast. Peace. Peace. Peace. Peace.

The world got rules, they say, that's a rumor But now I'm lying, it's a rumor They ain't even trying to fight it, we crying goodbye We got dinosaurs through the designs One, two, one, two, I done read books by Sun Tzu Learned from beautiful women who roll my joints too The opposite of humble and my swag on comfort No admission for the cool, just kickin' and come through Hurry up, we got liquor to run through Bells to inhale, lies to not tell She told me let her go and then I could exhale I left her with a pound of drool in her next tail

The Bullwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.