Jonathan Chait: A Scary Clown
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For more information and important disclosures, visit grayscale.com. Hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, coming at you from my husband's childhood bedroom because it's Thanksgiving week. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. And I'm here today with a friend that I do not want to talk about college football with. His name is Jonathan Shate. He's a staff writer now at The Atlantic, writing about American politics. He was previously at New York Magazine. How are you doing, man?

I'm doing great, Tim. Absolutely great. Really? Yeah. Just based on your family or the country or Michigan's recruiting? You know, all of the above. Well, not the country. Two of the three. Two out of three ain't bad, Tim. Two out of three ain't bad. That is for sure. Well, thank you for coming with us on Thanksgiving Eve. You wrote about something of great interest to me, which is Pete Hegseth.

I'm obsessed with Pete Hegseth and this choice. I found it very strange. I don't find it strange, actually, but I found it very misguided that everybody spent their focus on Matt Gaetz when Pete Hegseth was obviously the most absurd and ludicrous choice and dangerous choice, frankly. And so I want to spend the second half of the podcast on Pete Hegseth. We got to do Democratic stuff first, if that's OK. Yep.

The Harris campaign leadership team, Steph Cutter, David Plouffe, General Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, did an interview with Dan Pfeiffer of Ponte of America yesterday. It was very lengthy, so I don't expect everybody to have listened. I want to pull out two points from their conversation that I particularly wanted to get your take on. The first one was something that Plouffe was talking about. The numbers he gave was that the country shifted eight points to the right in

he called it negative eight points in non battleground States and negative three points in swing States. I've seen other analysis that put it at five and two, but whichever number you want to use, uh,

Clearly, the country moved more towards Trump in places where the campaign wasn't waged. So to me, there are two ways you can look at that. On the one hand, the campaign wasn't as bad as everybody makes it out to be and that the campaign strategies worked to some degree. The other way to look at it is that the Democratic brand is worse than it seems, actually, because in places where the campaign wasn't waged.

They got absolutely slaughtered by somebody that, you know, attempted a coup and is a total ass clown. So I guess open-ended question on how you see that. Yeah. I mean, multi-causality, I think, is the word you have to keep in mind when analyzing the cause of this defeat. There are factors within their control. There are factors that are outside of their control. If you want to hear my take on it, it's going to go through a few steps.

But I think you have to begin with the fact that, you know, global inflation made every incumbent party super unpopular across the world, including in every incumbent party that stood for reelection in a democracy lost. I don't think losing was totally inevitable. I think if they ran a perfect campaign, they could have won. But they only ran a good campaign and not a perfect campaign. So that, to me, is the big picture.

But the mistakes they made started with, I think, a failure to appreciate how unpopular Joe Biden was.

I think the Democrats had really been trying to psych themselves up into seeing Joe Biden as being the new Roosevelt and this guy who's accomplished more than any Democratic president since Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson or whatever. And I think they actually internalized this message and this prevented them from seeing that Joe Biden was perceived by the country as Jimmy Carter. They saw him as a totally failed president.

And so when when so they stuck with Biden too long, they accepted his excuses for his performance for too long. And when they finally got slapped into reality, they said, well, why don't we just pick, you know, Joe Biden's vice president? That makes the most sense to us. Not thinking like you want to get as far away from this presidency as you possibly can, which I think was actually the correct choice.

So I think Harris took a lot of steps in that direction, but she didn't take enough steps in that direction. And she also never convincingly repudiated her left-wing stances from 2019. So she stopped talking about the stuff she was talking about four years before, and she was talking differently than Joe Biden, but she never really said what she would do differently than Joe Biden. And she never really said why she was

thinking differently than she was in 2019. And so I think she made a lot of good choices and had a lot of good messages, but she just couldn't quite cut those ties to her previous campaign and to her administration. I think because she was coming from a place of conviction, which is ironic because I think people think of her as a totally plastic individual, but I think she just genuinely likes Joe Biden, agrees with what they did,

doesn't really have a huge problem with the things she said in 2019, even if they weren't her deepest beliefs and just couldn't quite be cynical enough to say, no, I don't believe any of that stuff. And Joe Biden was wrong about X, Y, and Z. You know, there was a lot of complaints about that section of the interview. Also where, you know, the team was kind of giving excuses for why she didn't distance from Biden more. And as somebody that's been in those rooms, like they made some points that made sense to me. Like, you know, like, okay, let's say we had said that

you know, Kamala Harris thought that we overspent on the second stimulus bill, right? Or let's say that we thought that we should have addressed immigration more aggressively earlier. Well, there's no evidence that she did that actually, right? And so then the next questions come, you have to, you know, Democrats get graded on a different curve that New York Times reporters and Politico are following up. We're like, well, did she say that in a meeting? You know, is there any evidence that she actually, like, and so you end up getting wrapped around this axle where like she didn't actually distance.

That's too it's too naive. I mean, you're the cynical political operator here. Clearly, I'm sure you're you've already thought of the answer that popped into my head when I heard that, which is like, what about the private meeting she had with Joe Biden, where she told Joe individually, Joe, I'm worried that we're spending too much and there's going to be inflation. Joe, I'm worried about the immigration. Now, publicly, I'm going to back you. But here are my private concerns that are registering just between the two of us and won't be recorded anywhere.

What about those meetings, Tim? Are you ready for the problem with that answer, which they don't want to say on this podcast, which is the true problem, which is that the Joe Biden problem extended deeper than the fact that people didn't like his record. It was that personally, he was defensive and prickly about all this. And Joe Biden was not going to let her off the hook to do that.

Like there was no like Joe Biden needed to have the moment where he when he picked her, where they had a call, where he was like Kamala, whatever he called her. I'm sure I'm sure he had some folks he named. He called her young lady. You need you need to just do what you need to do. And if that means throwing the old man under the bus, you throw the old man under the bus and no, no worries here. And he did not do that.

He did the opposite. The team was prickly and did not like any evidence of distancing. So I think that he made it hard on her to do that too. That's...

a pretty devastating indictment of Joe Biden. I just don't see any other way to analyze it. There's not been any piece of evidence to the contrary. Democrats don't want to say it. I'm free to say it. There's not been a single leak that Joe Biden, you know what I mean? We would know if Joe Biden was doing that. And we see with our eyes the opposite, that both him and Jill are sensitive about all of this.

But that's true. But I suppose the more forgiving interpretation is that he genuinely believed all the stuff that everyone was telling him for four years, right? You're the new Roosevelt. You've accomplished more than anybody in history. Like he internalized that. So, you know, I think it was just impossible for him to get into the headspace of I'm Jimmy Carter and the candidate needs to get as far away from me as possible.

That is true. I think that is a more generous and accurate interpretation of his perspective. So I guess just back to the original question, my other thought is, as I was listening to that, is to me...

All of the autopsy stuff that focuses on tactics is basically wrong. If you come to the fundamental, you know, if you just focus on that fundamental stat that Harris did three to 5% worse in places where they didn't campaign, right? Like that, the campaign tactics worked, the democratic brand was at fault. And so whether it was just inflation, whether it was just Joe Biden, whether it was something more fundamental about how people see Democrats,

Like the only way to actually change the result was to change one of those more fundamental things. And all the other stuff is nitpicking. Well, that's right. I mean, there are different ways of saying the same thing, but right. They put her in the game in the fourth quarter when she was down by 17 points and they lost by six. So you could say, hey, she came back. She did a lot better than when we're starting. But also they needed a plan to score three touchdowns and they didn't they didn't quite get there.

Okay. Back to the football analogy. I know for people that didn't understand the intro, the number one high school player in the country was supposed to go to LSU, and Michigan stole him right out from under us, gave him $10 million. And in sports, you need villains. It's important. And so I'm glad that I have a villain, and it's Jonathan Chait's new quarterback coming in next year. And I really hope he face-points it.

Thank you. Michigan's been losing recruits to SEC players because of the money in the paper bag for decades. And then finally they legalized this so we can go to our network of billionaires. And suddenly Jim Bob's auto dealership in Baton Rouge is no longer dominating the financial space in recruiting. And we could just tap Larry Ellison's fortune. And Jim Bob is just cursing angrily. Bryce Underwood. I'm cursing Bryce Underwood underneath my breath. The other thing from the interview –

Quentin Fulks, who was there as part of the transition, he was Raphael Warnock's campaign manager in 22, was senior on Biden's team and then stuck around after the switch, as almost all the senior people did. He made this point, and I think that there was a lot of subtext here, and I'm hoping to talk to him about it. But in the meantime, I want to get your take. Let's listen to what he said to Dan Pfeiffer.

Jen said earlier that this isn't the problem of a 107-day campaign to solve. It's a party problem. Republicans don't make Trump apologize. And as Stephanie said, we don't have to mimic it. But I think that there are a lot of times where if you're in the Democratic Party and you step out of line, you get punished for it. That's what I was trying to say. Thank you for being more direct, Quinn. You get punished for it by your own party.

Republicans do not do that. They stay in line. Look at Kamala Harris' comments in the 2019 primary. You know, the reason why even that was being discussed is because of interest-based politics. I mean, we put out an ad with a cuss word in it and the amount of feedback that we got was insane. That's true.

Some of that is like just typical staff annoyance, right? I complain to my colleagues when I feel like I get unfair negative feedback about the brilliant work I do on this podcast. So some of it is that. But I think that there's something deeper there. The Democratic candidates...

And it relates to this authenticity question where it's hard, actually, for Democratic candidates to go on a podcast and talk for two hours and be themselves because they're very they're forced to be more cautious because they're worried about backlash from within their own coalition, that if they say one word out of step.

that they're going to get slapped down or if they give a policy position that's not in vogue on Twitter or TikTok that day that they're going to get dunked on. And that Republicans don't have to, Trump in particular, doesn't have to worry about that. And the Democrats do. And it's affecting the ability for candidates to message effectively. Is that how you heard it?

I heard a blending of two different ideas, which to me run in different directions. One is the idea that the Democratic Party has a lot of interest groups and pressure groups that police the language of phrasing of their candidates to an excessive degree and make it impossible for them to just to communicate in normal human language terms. Yes. That I think is like a really, I think it's a legitimate, true complaint. I think that's something that needs to be fixed.

I also thought I understood that as a reference to the different kind of media ecosystems that the two parties operate in, where Democrats need the New York Times to write stories about them that make them seem like decent people. If the New York Times writes a terrible story about Kamala Harris, it's a problem for Kamala Harris. Donald Trump doesn't have that problem because the conservative news ecosystem is never going to write a terrible story about him. As he said, he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue.

do. So that is a different kind of problem with different kind of ramifications, right? I mean, yes, having critical news coverage makes it harder for Democrats to win, but it also allows them to identify and correct errors. So fundamentally, it allows them to sort of get the poisons out of their system, whereas

The Republicans are in the sealed media echo chamber where the poisons just recirculate and get more toxic over time. So in the short run, it helps Republicans win elections. But this culture of of total cult like discipline just makes them unable to govern or think clearly about reality. So I think, you know, I wouldn't trade the Democrats problem for the Republicans problem in terms of the accountability they have to media.

The media question is so complicated, right? Because then they complain about the media stuff a lot in this interview and how, you know, there just is an imbalance. And that's true, right? And as you point out, sometimes that imbalance works out of Democrats' favor because it's important to not to be outside of a bubble. Other times, I think particularly in this election, it worked to their disfavor. And I think particularly so because of just

Like there was just nothing new under the sun to say about Donald Trump. And so some of the stuff, like some of the mainstream media stuff that trickles down and hurt some Republicans didn't, didn't really hurt him in the same way that it hurts other Republicans. I think that that language policing thing is important and it is important to take away for the Democrats, because I think it's important for the whole brand that like the way that people consume media. Now I did an interview for YouTube with Cameron Kasky, who was one of the March for our lives kids.

And he's just like, the way my friends consume media, we expect politicians to talk to us like everybody talks to us on Instagram and TikTok. And you can't do that if you're always looking over your shoulder about the fact that everything that you say is going to be policed. And it makes you come off as inauthentic. It makes you come off as phony. And that, I think, has to be fixed before 2028. I don't exactly know how to fix it either because it's a bottom-up problem.

Like the Republicans have their own bottom up problem, which is that their voters are crazy. That's a bigger bottom up problem. But the Democrats bottom up problem, which is that their voters demand total fealty to right speak. That's also a problem. I don't really know how to fix it.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think the Democratic Party becoming more and more reliant on college educated voters has changed the culture in a lot of ways. And one of those ways is just a kind of obsession with the power of language to frame choices. And I feel like

People apply this to the media, you know, like these constant campaigns to get the New York Times to use the word lie when they're clearly saying Donald Trump said something that isn't true. Like, you know, it's just important. It has to have the word lie instead of like Donald Trump made this obviously false claim that will rebut in the next six paragraphs. Yeah. There's one other autopsy thing I want to talk about to you, which was a coincidence. So you've joined the Atlantic again recently, as I mentioned, we love the Atlantic.

I keep asking Jeffrey Goldberg to give me like some residuals on all the Atlantic subscriptions that I've been bringing him, but that hasn't happened. But your last article for the Atlantic, I don't know if you noticed this, it like comes up and it was from 2012 after the, after the Romney loss. And it was about Josh Barrow, who's a, like me, a lapsed Republican. I don't know what you want to call him. Apostate, apostate center, right? Right. Thinker. And I want to pull one paragraph from it because I just think it's telling in two ways.

And you are writing about Barrow and Barrow said a mini profile. It was a mini profile. You're writing about him. The trouble is not simply that Republicans lack the imagination to come up with ideas to get higher wages, more jobs and affordable health care to the middle class. It's that there is no set of policies that is both acceptable to conservatives and likely to achieve these goals. The GOP's choice to advocate low taxes for the rich rather than fund any kind of scheme to provide health care for the uninsured.

was no mere oversight, but a conscious decision, he later wrote, one that inevitably followed from the party's dogmatic attachment to market outcomes and dictates of its donor base. The pro-middle class conservative project, he pronounced, is doomed. I found that so interesting because on the one hand,

He continues to be right. They have not actually offered any new pro-middle class economic agenda items, really, that are meaningfully different from back then. But they've been able to get those voters by doing something completely different through economic nationalism and Trump celebrity and et cetera, et cetera.

I'm interested in your take on both those things. Am I correct in how the Republicans successfully got middle class voters? And isn't it telling about this autopsy project that you can write this very correct, sensible analysis of how the Republicans failed, and yet they can succeed in a totally different way that we never would have expected in the winter of 2012? I mean, I think...

Concrete questions of distribution are an advantage for the Democratic Party and have been an advantage for the Democratic Party for the long time. The Democrats want to tax the rich at higher rates. That's popular. They want to spend more on retirement programs.

than the Republicans do. That's also popular. But that's just not the only issue set upon which elections are based. In 2012, it was the main one. Obama was very good at making that the main question of the election. You know, who's going to tax the rich more or less? Who's going to let government spend more or less on Medicare? But those questions just faded into the background in subsequent elections. So elections were decided on issues where Republicans are in stronger position. But Republicans...

actually change. No, they didn't change. Not at all. If you look at the 2012 autopsy and you're like, okay, there were multiple ways that you could change. Like, you know, I was as a social squish was like Republicans should reach out more to, you know, should soften on immigration and reach out more to the suburbs and do better with socially moderate suburban voters. That was one. Barrow is offering that Republicans should try to come up, you know, break some of their economic fealty to upper class tax cuts and reach out to working class voters.

You know, with a more populist economic agenda. Right. The Republicans did neither of those things and yet still succeeded. Let me let me amend my previous statement. They did change their message in a crucial way. Right. Donald Trump attacked Paul Ryan for wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security and said, I'm not going to do that.

So he really distanced himself from that image that the Republican Party had built. Now, I don't think his actual approach to governing changed very much, but his message and his profile did. And so, I mean, I think a lot of people saw Donald Trump as being more moderate than...

than Mitt Romney. I mean, I think that actually showed up in survey data. He had a more moderate image. And I think that that's why. I mean, the area where most people saw the Republican Party's extremes on fiscal policy and Donald Trump was talking much more like a like a Democrat. He was, you know, he even said at times in 2016, he would make the rich pay higher taxes. Now we did the opposite, but he talked about it and that worked.

Of course, the fact that he did the opposite is one reason why he lost in 2020 after winning in 2016. You know, he didn't follow through on his promise, and that was among the things that hurt him.

but he wins in 2024 doing even better with working class voters. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that like at this moment, there are these ways where you've, where everyone is like put projecting their own ideological agenda onto what needs to happen. And it's like the Democrats do need to figure out a way to do better with working in middle class voters. But the sense that there is necessarily a policy answer to that is,

It's like, maybe. Maybe there's a policy answer to that. Maybe there's a different policy switch. But also, the Republicans did it without really making meaningful... I guess your point is that they changed how they talk about Medicare and Social Security. I guess that's true. And taxes, too. Yeah. So, I mean, maybe the Democrats need to...

have a candidate that can do that and fake it. But they didn't, I guess my point is Republicans didn't really change their policies in any meaningful way and made huge gains with working class voters because the brand, they had an approved brand with working class voters because of other issues and ways that they- They didn't change how they governed, but they really did under, like-

I think Trump did understand to an extent that this was like why Mitt Romney lost. He was, you know, seen as basically having economic plans that were contrary to the interest of what most people wanted. And he messaged very differently about that. And that was and that was a smart choice.

So, I mean, I think, you know, ditching your most toxic policies can can work if you know if you can make it work. Now, the problem was for Republicans that that their party's conservative movement apparatus was all based on disciplining people on policies before Trump.

And so it was really difficult for a conservative to come along in the Republican Party and say, I'm going to be more moderate on fiscal policy because then you'd be a squish. You'd be a rhino, right? They would kill you on Fox News over that and you could never get the nomination. Trump found other ways to prove to Republicans that he was not a squish. He was the opposite of a rhino. He was a fighter, right? Democrats hated him while making those heresies on the fiscal policy be palatable to the base.

All right, so John Chait's path forward for the Democrats. Ditching the most toxic policy positions. Good.

And then identifying a demagogue who can signal to the base that they are extreme in very superficial ways and gain such loyalty with Democratic voters that they have the ability to separate themselves on policy. Is that the path forward? I don't know who can do that exactly. Bill Clinton doesn't have any eligibility left, does he?

He's pretty old. Yeah. Maybe Hasanabi, the Twitch streamer. I don't know. We'll have to look for potential candidates for that.

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Your latest article since the Hegseth one, which is up today, moderation is not the same thing as surrender, is the headline. You write about how you can follow that mindset under the rubric of trans issues.

We've been talking about trans issues about as much as I can handle over the past three weeks. So you're welcome. You're welcome to speak to that. But I want you to take the same thesis and apply it to another issue for me as well, because I've been watching the brewing fight over sanctuary cities that is coming. And I think that is going to be a real pickle for Democrats.

Which is if the federal government and, you know, Tom Holman and Stephen Miller are like, sorry, no such thing as sanctuary cities. We're going to deport people from Denver or Oakland or wherever. And where they actually really kind of do it performatively, really more than have a real effort to deport a lot of people from those cities. But they do it to pick the fight. And so I guess on both of those issues, I'm wondering the chate answer for how do you how do you not surrender while also fighting?

doing smart politics? It's a tough one because, you know, you know, this policy is going to cause a lot of horrible cruelty in people's lives. But I think just as a matter of political legitimacy, the federal government does have the right to enforce immigration laws, right? And if someone is here, contrary to the law, I feel like the federal government

has a right to deport them. It's more of a practical question of how much disruption they're willing to tolerate in the enforcement of those rules. But this isn't a situation like, you know, Donald Trump ordering the Defense Department to fire on innocent protesters or ginning up, you know, cases against his political enemies. Like that's a legitimate, straightforward function of the federal government. And it shouldn't be states and cities that are

mainly tasked with enforcing these laws, it should be the federal government, right? Like, I don't think Democrats would want a situation where Democrats won the election and Republican cities or states or localities were just defying an area under the control of the federal government, right? So I think the procedural ground on which Democrats are standing here seems kind of shaky. I also think politically,

that this, if executed in anything like the way Trump says, is going to backfire. It's going to be massively disruptive. It's going to put a lot of industries like construction into chaos. Agriculture, you've already got industries begging Trump for exceptions to this. So, I mean, you don't want to just say, like, let him do what he wants to do. Let him, you know, hurt as many people as he wants to hurt and then wait for, you know, political profit. But

I think you have to understand that he is proposing a course of action that's likely to

to backfire politically. And as the bulwark wrote, you know, maybe this is like an approach to Trump instead of having people stop Trump from doing the things he wants to do, which allows him to have the double benefit of the dramatic announcement, liberals going crazy, and then nothing bad happens. And then it just feels like the boy who cries wolf to the public. You actually have the wolf eating some sheep. Now, I'm not one of those sheep, so it's easy for me to say, but

I think as you understand the political leverage points, that's the dynamic that springs to my mind. I think it's a really tough one. I put you on the spot, so it's a decent answer. I think that the thesis, which I agree with at the top line, which is...

It's maybe a different way to put moderation is not the same as surrender is that fighting smart is not the same as surrender. Like choosing winning political battles is not the same as surrender. Right. And I think that across all of these issues, trans gender rights, immigration, even the issues that are the that are unfavorable for the Democrats in the macro. There are examples of fights where the Democrats are on the winning side.

And choosing those and elevating those during the next two years before the midterms is probably going to be the judicious move.

But that's tough to do because there's not like a Democratic boss that gets to tell every Democratic mayor, you know, don't pick this fight. This one isn't a judicious one. You know, pick a different fight. You know, so it's tough to manage. Right. And Chicago seems to be the place where the Trump administration is most focused on this on this immigration fight. And Brandon Johnson is going to relish that. Brandon Johnson has has run the city schools into the ground. Right. He's basically like.

you know, put the teachers unions in charge of the school system. His approval rating is 15%. There's nothing he would love more than a huge fight with the Trump administration to get the liberals who are disgusted with his, with his leadership of the schools back on side. So I think, you know, it's going to work out well for Brandon Johnson and for Donald Trump to have this fight, but it may not work out well for the democratic party. It's 15% not good. Are you trying to get a little, are you trying to get a lot of math major, Tim, help me out. Yeah, well you did go to Michigan.

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Pete Exeth has written four books. You read three of them. Could you not find the fourth? Or was it just your brain could only take three? He wrote five books. I deemed only three of them relevant because one of them came when he was like a bushy neocon. And he since completely repudiated all those views. So I didn't need to, like, read all the beliefs he no longer holds. And one of them were just a bunch of war stories, which I also thought were.

wouldn't tell you a whole lot. But the other thing, there are three books I found very pertinent to his worldview and his descent into crankery. Yeah. So there are a few elements of these books I want to talk about that I think are mockable and

And alarming at the same time. We have to hold both of those ideas in our head at the same time. He is both a clown and a scary clown. There are a lot of scary clowns out there. And so he might be their leader. So among the three books, give us your top takeaway holistically reading the Pete Hegseth oeuvre, though, I mean, his ghostwriter's oeuvre. But, you know, anyway. Two of those books feel like they were primarily written by him. I mean,

The language sounds like it, but there were a lot of interesting themes. The number one theme I got is that the distinction in his mind between the mentality you use in fighting overseas enemies like Al-Qaeda and in fighting domestic political enemies like the Democratic Party has narrowed to the point of almost nonexistence. He has come to see the Democratic Party as an enemy. He constantly applies...

metaphors that are sometimes not even metaphors of military fighting to this domestic political struggle.

which he sees as completely existential. He's convinced the left, which he means basically anyone to the left of Donald Trump, is going to destroy the country unless they are destroyed by the forces of Trump. And now I feel like he's in a position to advance that project. Give me some specific examples of that that he talks about. So the first book that I looked at, it's called American Crusade. And that's basically, he uses the metaphor of the Crusades, which basically,

I don't find it especially inspiring historical episode, but he does find an inspiring historical episode. And he basically calls his supporters to launch the equivalent of a crusade here in the United States of America. And, you know, the crusades were bad for the Jews, bad for the Muslims. He chillingly expresses some quick regrets about what happened to the Jews during the crusades.

He does not have any regrets about what happened to the Muslims during the crusades. And that's the central metaphor he, he constructs for domestic policy, a crusade. It doesn't seem like he likes the Muslims that much. I don't, that message really didn't trickle down to Dearborn apparently in the protest. Absolutely. Pivoted to voting for Donald Trump, but he doesn't, doesn't seem to be a huge fan of Muslims. Right. I mean, that's, I think one of, you know, many problems that comes through. Um, he is this, you know, a traditional kind of, um,

you know, conservative, a philo-Semite in a way that feels almost uncomfortable for Jews sometimes. Like, you know, the Jews are our little buddies in the war against the Muslims. And, you know, the role of the Jews is to control the complete, you know, holy land until they are destroyed in a fiery Holocaust when, you know, the world ends. And, you know, it's not the worst thing that can be said about the Jews, but it's also not the best.

The other thing in American Crusade that I pulled out here that is relevant to our domestic concerns, our American Crusade is not about literal swords and our fight is not with guns. Yet. Yet. Italicized. Italicized. Yet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of lines like that where he's basically using a military metaphor and then he goes right up to the line of saying, well, actually, this isn't just a metaphor. This is...

This is how we're going to do it. But that's the overall mentality, the overall approach where he's just got this completely hysterical analysis of the American left and its control of all the institutions and sees this as a fight to the death and doesn't see the possibility of America basically surviving with people holding views he finds objectionable over the long run. He sees that the need to essentially exterminate that opposition policy

politically, and sometimes it's not totally clear. He only means politically. So there's just this like bloodlust that comes through the rhetoric. He applies to domestic political conflict that's uncomfortable. His most recent book is, among other things, just a straight up defense of war crimes. He basically objects to military law.

as it pertains to treatment of enemy combatants, enemy detainees. And he's a big advocate for war criminals. Yeah, he loves the war criminals. You know, he talked about how in the military, the judge advocate general was called Jagoffs, and he has multiple lines in his last book where he just...

In toto objects to the idea that the military should have to follow rules. He basically says like the enemy doesn't follow any rules and we need to be more ruthless than the enemy. So his his basic idea of fighting Al Qaeda is we need to be Al Qaeda needs to be the ones who's being held to the higher standard. We need to go lower than Al Qaeda in our self-regulation. That's a whole other area that's incredibly disturbing and I think totally disqualifying for a defense secretary.

Yeah, I mean, among the many problems, again, having a book where you're maligning as jagoffs, like a whole category of people that is going to be reporting to you and working for you. And between women in combat and army lawyers, like there is going to be hundreds of thousands of people that are under his remit that he has said, like, shouldn't be there.

essentially. Yeah, he puts like scare quotes around phrases like international rights. And, you know, he just completely objects to the whole idea of, you know, the rules of war, just like he just doesn't think that that stuff has any legitimacy whatsoever. And also, I think also pertinent to how he would conduct himself in this job. He wants to purge the military of anyone who basically disagrees with him about social policy diversity, which I think is

more or less a code for getting rid of anyone who's not a Republican from the military leadership, which is also something that Trump is very interested in. So I think people saw Pete Hexeth and thought, oh, Trump is appointing the guy he sees on television and likes. But I think there's actually a real commonality of agenda that drove this decision. You have more of a calm sometimes than some of my colleagues at the Bulwark, including JVL. But I want to represent JVL here. If you think about

The potential dangers ahead of a Trump term, right? Like the worst case outcome is,

Essentially, I mean, I guess nuclear annihilation is the worst case outcome, but in the top three or four of the worst case foreseeable outcomes is having a military that becomes completely beholden to him and his extrajudicial demands, whatever they may be, whatever they may be at age 82 when he is of declining mental faculties and losing his grip on power.

and having a military that has been shed of anyone that is going to object to those sorts of things. And like, Hengstaff feels like exactly the type of person that you would want to be Secretary of Defense in that worst case scenario. Precisely. No, Pete Hengstaff is begging Donald Trump to purge the military, commit war crimes, and use the military to crush any kind of

domestic protest that embarrasses or discomforts Trump. And I think you have to even think this through to the next step is what happens when some of these steps start to happen? I mean, I feel like the whole conservative movement, even the anti-anti-Trumpers,

are pretty much behind this unitary executive theory, right? So like they're saying now, oh, don't worry, the military will stop him. But they don't think the military should be able to stop him. They think the federal government should be under the complete control of the president, or at least they think that when the president's a Republican. So I don't really see any intellectual basis for them to resist these moves for him to just fire generals on the basis of politics in order that order the military to do things that

he wants them to do that have been outside his traditional purview. So sometimes when you actually read the full three books, which you did, versus just kind of glancing at the worst quotes, you get a

You get a more full perspective on how much this guy seems brash and how much of this was for the book jacket. To you, when you think about that worst case scenario, the person that you somewhat got to know over the course of those three books, how do you judge, how do you assess how much Pete Hegseth

seems to be willing to go along or interested in going along with Donald Trump's worst impulses? You know, what kept flashing in my mind is General Ripper and Dr. Strange Glove.

I want to bring in the third book that we did discuss, which is about the American education system, because in some ways this is the most deranged of the three books. He argues that the entire American education system. So just to pull back, you've had a lot of complaints about the education system from the right, you know, and some of those complaints I think have real legitimacy, right? When they talk about the 1619 project and Howard Zinn and, and weird left-wing theories in the classroom, some of that stuff is real. And some of that stuff, you know, I, I understand what they're saying, but,

When he's saying the American education system is communist and he's not talking about things that have happened in the last five years, he's talking about things that have gone on since the 19th century. He says the whole structure of American education, the creation of social sciences, the very way the schools are structured are a plot to soften up the American public for communism.

I can't tell you how far from reality this is, but it really did feel like I'm listening to General Ripper and Dr. Strangeglove talk about our precious bodily fluids in the communist conspiracy. So he really does think he equates...

Marxism with not only the entire American left, but almost every American institution that isn't directly controlled by the Republican Party and sees this vast, sinister plot to completely destroy the United States of America that's been moving at an accelerated rate and has to be eradicated. That's the worldview you get from these books. So he's really a guy who's gone...

very, very far off the rails in five. I mean, he was very, very conservative a few years ago, and he's gone significantly to the right since then. So we have somebody with no qualifications and no leadership experience who is consumed with a deep paranoia and is borderline bloodthirsty to take out his domestic enemies. Is that a fair assessment of what you saw?

Yeah, that's the picture. It's pretty chilling. That's basically a worst case scenario for Secretary of Defense. I liked in that book, you pulled out one quote, which I liked because it also speaks to his dumbness. Here's a sentence from the book. Let that sink in. The manner in which we study politics, history and economics in American schools today is the product of Marxists.

It's just like it's like it's like a six. I don't even know. It's like a high school Republican, like writing at a sixth grade level with Twitter brain, like assessing the American education system. Now, this book, this book, the education book was co-written with some kind of right wing conservative education, you know, Christian school specialist.

And it seemed to be that like Hexeth almost like, you know, with the way Trump reads his speeches and then comments on his speeches, because like he's encountering the words for the first time. It's like, whoa, it's so true. It's amazing. He's sort of doing that where it's like he's he's like encountering this passage written by his co-authors. Like, wow, can you believe it? Like I had to read that again to believe it myself. It's crazy, but it must be true because my name is on this book.

It's like, let that sink in. Smart man just told me something about Marxism. I'm still sinking in myself. The defenders of Hegseth have pointed to the book, which we've talked about some, but I want to go to one element of it, The War on Warriors, as the rationale for him being Secretary of Defense, right? That he has assessed the...

failures within the Defense Department, mostly related to DEI and the way that they're letting the lawyers run the show. And he's done a deep dive on that. And he's proposed reforms. And he wrote a bestselling book about those reforms. And that is what undergirds the rationale for him being Secretary of Defense.

Are there serious elements to the proposed reforms or is the entire book like written at a weekend Fox and Friends host level? It's the latter. And that's why I sort of challenged you when you said like his ghostwriter wrote the book. No, I mean, it reads like just a bunch of Fox News monologues strung together. Like it reads exactly like he talks on television and at that level of thought. There's no plan. There's no detail here. It's just a bunch of diatribes against

the woke military against DEI, unqualified women and minorities who are being raised about levels above Pete Hegseth. When of course, Pete Hegseth is the most unqualified promotion in the history of the defense department. I do struggle with that. I do struggle with marrying the two

Right.

Well, because he doesn't see qualifications the same way you do. He sees Pete Hegseth as uniquely qualified by virtue of his own grit and determination. And I also think he, in some ways, equates qualifications with whiteness and maleness in some implicit way. Now, he does take pains to say at many points in this book, you know, I knew this black soldier and that Latino soldier and they were good soldiers and they weren't the woke ones.

They weren't the diversity of hires. But he also is, among other things, a complete egomaniac who can't stop talking about his own manliness and his own grit and how he overcame all terrible odds in everything he did and dragged himself up from the bottom and by his own pure merit. So I think the idea that Pete Hexeth is not a merit hire is incomprehensible to Pete Hexeth.

The egomania is something that's interesting. My father, I was talking to this about my father over the weekend and that was his observation. He's like more conservative and not like, is, is that going to be as, as offended maybe by some of the ideological elements or some of the specific statements of Higgseth. But it's like, you know, he was like, if you somehow became president, uh,

And you were like, hey, I want you to make me the Treasury Secretary. My dad is like, I would not accept the role. You have to have some level of – you do have to be totally psychotic to think you can run the Defense Department after being a weekend talk show host. Okay, the last thing on this point is you know who is aware of this? It's Pete Hegseth, my colleague, Sam Stein. I had an item about this over the weekend. This was when Pete Hegseth was running Concerned Vets for America.

an AstroTurf group, he said this, I've got a glimpse inside their campaign. They're probably assembling some generals right now to bring into a room to brief Donald Trump about some of these particular nuances, because at the end of the day, foreign policy and national security is not about TV shows. It's a complex web of relationships. I could literally be criticized Donald Trump in 2016 for caring too much about what TV show hosts think. And here we are. So that's the sadness of our life.

Yeah, no, he used to be a neoconservative anti-Trumper, and there's almost like this struggle session he conducts in his book where he beats himself up for having been fooled by the elites into hating Donald Trump, and he really confesses error and repents for his anti-Trumpism. Well, that's the fastest way to the cabinet these days, being on TV and repenting for your anti-Trump sins. There's hope for you, Tim. The path is there. Yeah.

There is hope for me. I say this to Democrats sometimes. I was like, if there's one thing that you can learn from Trump about accepting apostates and accepting people that disagree, if I put on a red hat right now at the end of this podcast and I was like, I've told you, Jonathan Shate, Trump is the best, except for sect death, except for ever no women in the military. I'm on the crusade. I'm in now. Hell yeah. I could conceivably be the spokesperson for the Defense Department.

Liberals are always looking for heretics and conservatives are always looking for converts. Michael Kinsley once wrote that and it's still true. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lesson there. Okay. Everyone, have a wonderful Thanksgiving. If you missed it yesterday, I did a mailbag on how to deal with Thanksgiving family members that might be a struggle. Hopefully my wisdom was helpful for some people. And, you know, take it as it is. If not, if that wisdom of how to deal with your family isn't helpful, I've put in the show notes for you my Thanksgiving playlist. I do not accept Christmas music before December, so I've made a Thanksgiving playlist for everyone that you can enjoy listening

while you are digesting your stuffing and cranberry sauce. Thank you so much to Jonathan Chait. Everybody else, we're taking the week off unless, who the hell knows, unless, I don't know, something happens that makes me come back. And until then, I'll see you guys on Monday. Have a wonderful holiday. Peace. Thank you, Jim.

Thank God.

Oh, Jesus, how we found

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