Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last: The Lonely Boy Club
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All right. Hey, everybody. I want to give you a quick scheduling update about what to expect from this podcast today. We had one of our favorites not get their calendar right. And so we had to have a change of schedule. So we're going to do something special today. Usually Sarah Longwell and JVL, my faves, my colleagues have a secret podcast for Bullwark Plus subscribers only on Fridays. We're

We're going to do a double dip of that where I have Sarah and JVL on this podcast and we talk about the news of the day. And then we're going to go over to the secret podcast and all three of us are going to talk about our feelings and JVL's newsletter from yesterday about fear and being afraid. Something we've been texting about, so we're going to bring it to podcast.

land. If you're not a Bulwark Plus subscriber yet, you can get that by going to thebulwark.com slash subscribe. We'd love to have you. That's how we're paying the bills and bringing on all these new great people to the team. So I appreciate everybody who's been supporting us through Bulwark Plus.

Rest of the schedule, we will have a podcast next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. There will not be a Thanksgiving podcast. There will almost certainly not be a Friday podcast. But if Trump, you know, picks macho man Randy Savage to be in his cabinet or something, and, you know, I absolutely need to come here and give you 20 minutes of thoughts, then

Then I'll do that next Friday. So that's our schedule. Other stuff on guests, polarizing Sam Harris yesterday, which I knew would happen, but I find him interesting and I want to continue to have interesting people that I disagree with on various things that even though me and Sam agreed on a lot of stuff, he was a little overboard on some of the trans stuff for me. But besides that, we have a lot of agreement.

I have some people in the hopper that I totally disagree with that are very Bernie-ish about what they think the party should do going forward. And I'm going to try to have a wide range of guests, obviously keeping our core Never Trumpers in the rotation too. So look out for that. If you have recommendations, suggestions for guests, send them to me.

Speaking of sending things to me, the Substack messaging platform is like, I mean, so many people are messaging there that my Substack messenger is crashing. So...

You can always email me, tim at the bulwark.com. If I haven't gotten back to you, if you're a Bulwark Plus subscriber and you're messaging me on Substack, I'm sorry. I'll try to get to it. Hopefully, it'll chill out at some point. But FYI, tim at the bulwark.com is my email. Shorter emails are more likely to get responses because I'm just doing my best out there, people. Lastly, it's Friday. We put up the playlist of People Ask. We put the playlist for the outro songs in the show notes.

I'm slowly moving away from trying to make you cry, but I'll bring some crying songs back probably between now and January 20th. So that's it. That's what we got on tap. Up next, Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last.

Never coming back

And I'm just wondering, why didn't you stay and start a lesbian commune? That is where I was. With them? No, I was there. I was visiting Portia and Ellen. They are our leaders. And so we pilgrimage there in moments of crisis. Are they in Coventry, governor? It was great to see them. You know, Ellen looks amazing. She must be using one skin. She just looks outstanding.

So anyway, marrying Portia de Rossi for Ellen, that was just, it was huge. It was huge for all of us, I got to say. No, that's not what I was doing. I was giving a series of speeches that I had agreed to prior to the election results in Italy. Do you have to rewrite those drafts?

No, I'm the same no matter what happens, no matter where I go. It did force me to clarify my feelings about the election, why it happened. It was a lot of, I'll tell you what, looking the Europeans in the eye right now, though, is tough because there is just, they're looking at you like,

But how could you guys do this? How could this happen? So that part was hard. The being in Italy and London part was not hard. That was nice. I never make jokes about leaving America because I don't like those jokes. I think you stay in America. I do love America. I also think you stay and fight. That's just that's that's who we are. So I'm not actually that happy about Ellen and Portia leaving. They need it. That's not a good example to set. You guys need to come home.

Stand up here. Come home to Montecito. That's right. Put down their flag at the capital of the resistance. I just think that Helen and Portia were going to be okay. Absolutely.

And, you know, we will get to this later, but I have words for everybody who are consumed with fear at the moment. We're going to buck people up. Okay, we're going to get to fear in the bonus part. Now is not the time for fear, Doctor. That comes later. This is a Bane joke, Sarah. I didn't get it.

Sarah, I want, though, from you, because you haven't been here, like as we've just been grinding out YouTube hot takes about every former wrestler and former and like C-list Fox News guest host that's going to be joining our meritocratic cabinet.

And so I'm just kind of wondering your biggest picture thoughts. Has anything evolved since I last saw you and you're thinking about the election or what's to come? Any open end for you to just give us your tight five? Look, I'm glad that Gates went down. I know we're going to talk about him later. But one of the things that has been remarkable to me about this cabinet is how many people accused of sexual assault, credibly accused of sexual assault, make it up. I'm sure you guys have covered this, but I do just want to say,

They're one of the things that eats at me because I came up in my career abutting many social conservatives who lectured us a great deal about sexual morality, about why gay people shouldn't be allowed to get married. And it was for them, sort of sexual morality was very much linked to character. And that was a function of the time in which I became politically conscious, which was sort of in the wake of Bill Clinton and the sex scandals that he had.

And that was what conservatives were sort of marshalling against, right? It was this idea that not only was Bill Clinton accused of sexual assault and certainly was using his power. Actually, I don't understand why Dems haven't canceled Bill Clinton harder, by the way. It's like a real problem for me that annoys the shit out of me. Excuse me. I started swearing in Europe. I'm sorry. I swear in your show. No, you're on the Daily Bulldog podcast. So it's swearing that's happening. It's my influence. I usually try not to.

Anyway, it wasn't just Gates, which was flat out trafficking, right? It is also Linda McMahon. It's like the women, like you actually have the women who are sexual assaulters. Okay, and then there's Hegseff and RFK. I mean, and these are serial. But here's the thing about the social conservatives that is wild to me. It is like they went from seeing sexual morality as a mark of character to like sexual assault is cool, y'all, and we're fine with it.

And to me, that's like in two decades. And to me, that is a wild swing. And that doesn't even bring in Donald Trump, obviously an adjudicated rapist. And then you just have like the regular old, and look, I'm not, I don't even care about this stuff, but like you've got your, your Kristi Noem with the dog shooting and the Corey Lewandowski of it all. So like, this is a messy reality TV show with an enormous amount of power. And it is like very much the clown with the flamethrower.

That's just been what this is. So it was interesting to watch it from abroad take shape, like to watch these nominations get rolled out and have people, you know, in other countries be like, I'm sorry, she's a wrestler? Like, what? We don't understand. Oh, Dr. Oz? This is the other thing. In conservative world, the one I grew up in, in fact, the one that I dedicated, the one where I worked for so long, I can't tell you, it was oriented around women.

anti-nanny statism, right? It had this real libertarian streak through it. The anti-nanny statism, you know, don't tell us how to live our lives, what food we can eat. I mean, they called them freedom fries for the love of God. And so like the weirdness. No beef tallow in the freedom fries. Let me tell you that much. Just good American seed oil. That's right. So I'm excited to talk to you guys a little bit more. I'd like to grapple with the thing that I am not sure of, which is

How much better is it if you knock some of these guys out versus, to JVL's point, sort of letting them get the full experience? Yeah, let's talk about that with Gates. I want to just revise and extend your point on the sexual morality thing just even one step a little further. Because it's not even just about their personal life. We saw this week at HHS.

They're putting through RFK Jr., who's pro-choice and who wants to do all the nanny state stuff you're just talking about. And they're blocking one of the Project 2025 guys that was going to be a deputy at HHS that wrote the Project 2025 section on, I don't know, like,

like preventing people from mailing birth control or something through HHS. They're blocking him because they think he's too extreme. They're worried that there will be like blowback to have like the Project 2025 pro-life guy in HHS. And so it's also on the policy point that the supposed social conservatives have completely folded. It's not even just on the personal morality. But here's...

Here's the thing, is that actually, I don't care very much about the sexual... Me neither. It's just a point. It's just a point. I literally don't care about that. What's interesting is how much social conservatives cared about it for so long. I do care a great deal, though, about normalizing, negating, deciding that people in power, that it is fine that they have committed sexual assault against people. Like Pete Hegseth, the idea that he is going to be in charge of the military that only brought

women in, you know, within our lifetimes and is still kind of working out culturally what that means. Not only does he not think women should be in combat, he thinks it's okay to assault them. I don't care about none of that. I care about the fact that he commits violence against

against women. He also had three marriages and a love child before he turned 40. Okay, but to me, I don't know a lot of people on their third marriage at 39. It doesn't show a lot of stability in one's personal life. I can think of one right off the top of my head. Trump? No. Tim knows exactly what I'm talking about. I want to ask you something, Sarah, though. Are Republican voters fine with it, the sexual assault stuff, or are they into it?

Now, I understand that, like, the answer is that the Republican coalition is big and there are they're going to be, you know, there's a segment of the Republican coalition which looks at it and just has to put its, you know, close its eyes and put its fingers in its ears and pretend it's not there. Fake news. Fake news didn't happen. Then there's another segment which is like, yeah, I know it's not great, but ultimately it's the policies that matter. But isn't there a segment which is quite large?

At least a third of it, which is into it. So this is a little bit tough to parse because you have to like really get inside somebody else's motivations. But I will say that...

I've talked a lot about the unholy alliance with the new sort of red-pilled Republican Party that comes from kind of the barstool sports, but also Elon, Manosphere, podcasting world. And I think that misogyny is a pretty regular feature of that world. This is what I was trying to get at. Yeah. And so, like, I don't think people in that world would be like, I am into sexual assault.

But I do think they certainly wouldn't admit that out loud. But I do think that they have a real like,

A guy who puts women in their place. When you're a famous guy and like, you should be able to go like reap the benefits of that fame. And, you know, these are all lying B words. And like, I see what these women do. And yeah, I think there's a real strain of that that is deeply gross. And I guess this is why I get hung up on the social conservatives, just because it was such a

such a significant part of my sort of 20s and 30s listening to these guys lecture us on things. And you don't like being lectured. I don't like being lectured. You don't. I don't either. We don't. I should have said we. We don't like being lectured. So if you're going to fucking lecture us, you better have the moral. You better actually have the high ground. Okay. You better at least be lecturing us from a place of honesty. Well, it just, it just,

JBL sort of always talked about this, and I think that there's just a real strain of, you know, where I would have defended people against sexism or racism, like sort of the whole party. I would have been like, of course, some of that's there, but I wouldn't say it's like animating in a way that I think is

obsession with strength and manliness that has sort of coursed through the right wing dialogue is steeped. It's not 2%. Yeah, is steeped in a kind of hatred for women. Real hatred of women. Yeah. And again, I'm not saying it's all Republicans, but it ain't 2% either. No. And part of it is like we

We as a country are having to pay for sort of the lonely boy pathologies of a bunch of broken oligarchs who got stuffed in lockers when they were kids and who now can father nine children across the board with a bunch of women, which is now I'm talking about Elon. I don't know if that's who you were talking about before. No, we were talking about Ben Dominich and Pete Hegseth, but continue. Yeah.

Okay, I don't know. But Tim, good call. You were picking up what I was putting down. I know. Do you know the reason why? As I was preparing this rant, I was like, do I know anybody that is actually on Marriage 3 that cheated on the wife and had a love child by 39? And I also prepped that one example. Continue. Not a love child. No love child for Ben.

I just do think about what it says to women. I'm sad for girls who are watching –

Gates and like the idea that you are somebody who has committed assault against women. And like Trump has been credibly accused and adjudicated tons of times. Talked about walking into the Miss USA room, like talked about grabbing women by their genitals. And America said, yep, we're going to elevate all of these people into positions of power and they are going to be over you. Including a majority of white women. Yeah. So like imagine Pete Hegseth is your boss. What do you know? You know he holds women in contempt. Yeah.

It just really is gross. And I can't get over the dads, like the dads of girls who are just like, and the thing is, sorry, and then I'll stop ranting. I have a lot of pent up feelings about a lot of things. You're coming back across the pond and you're hot. Which is, then they dare to try to butch up

their defense of women with the, well, I have daughters and I don't want her playing against trans people in sports. Now, because that's a thing that's happening everywhere. We can have a real conversation and I will, I will have a complicated view. It's a complicated issue.

But watching all of these guys who I know have done nothing but make fun of women's sports suddenly be like, oh, I really care. And who are willing to elevate these sexual assaulters, try to then take some kind of moral stand around women's sports, like, is so gross to me. It's all so gross. That's how I feel. I feel like I want to take a shower all the time because it's all so gross watching this happen. I feel like I don't want to shower. Hold on. Can I take over my show?

Can I make one point? Can I take my show back? Go ahead. I forgot it's Tim's show. So somebody like Pete Hegseth could not be hired to be the CEO of a large private sector corporation because he's an immediate legal liability.

Sure. Right. But like you, you simply cannot put somebody in charge because you'd be like, I'm like this. We do this. We are opening ourselves up to an entire universe of legal action because this guy is an HR nightmare. And we are we are automatically creating a hostile work environment for like every woman who direct reports to him. We can't do that, but we can sure make him secretary of defense.

Okay. Three million people will be in charge of it. That's what I was thinking when Sarah was like, imagine that Pete Hicks is going to be your boss. He's going to be three million people's boss if he gets this job. And a lot of them are women. Yeah, a lot of them are women. This guy from Breaking Point, Sager, I talked to Bill about this on Monday, unironically sent out a tweet this week that was like, this is the Me Too backlash cabinet. I don't have the exact tweet in front of me, but like, you know, it's like,

Okay, is that a brag? Is that like a good? He meant that in a good way. Oh, he did mean it in a good way? It's a real observation. He's a brag, so I think he meant it in a good way. I can't get inside his head. So anyway, that's where things are going. I'm going to teach you little ladies a lesson about opening your mouth. Good thing this is a double dose podcast today because we're 17 minutes in and I haven't even made it to the number one item on the agenda. All right, Matt Cates.

Matt Gaetz, I don't know if you saw that, withdrew yesterday. His nomination for the Attorney General. And so I want to get into what that means. And I guess my opening question about this is to Sarah. Are you ready to be Lucy with the football again on these GOP senators? Are you getting that hope again that that spine is growing? Tom Tillis and John Curtis and Mitch McConnell and John Thune are going to

Is he standing up to Trump or is this just a one-off? I don't know. That's why I asked. And JBL should get to talk now. He hasn't gotten to talk very much. This is what I wanted to grapple with, though, is, is killing the Gates nomination, does it give them more of a backbone? Because they, and I don't know if the Pam Bondi as the next in line, if these Republicans go,

Well, that's a big improvement. Although I will say, considering where they started with Gates, Pam Bondi is an improvement, like an objective improvement. And this is where they're all saying, well, this is how Trump plays 14-dimension chess, right? He's just over there eating the pieces. But everybody is there to make sure you guys know that this is all to plan.

which is he's going to get people through by giving them a sacrificial lamb like Gates, who was going to go down anyway. And by doing that, they sort of got him out of Congress before that report comes out and just torches him forever. That's how they think he's playing 14 dimensional chess. I think that Trump really wanted him.

and that he's been delivered a defeat and we should treat it as such. So I think it is good that the Republicans have stood up to him. And I think that we should tell them, all right, we're exercising some of our advising consent power. Keep it up, guys. And look, they don't have as big a majority as you would think. And if you lose two with each of these, with Murkowski and Collins, like, can you pick up two more? You don't think there's another two or three people who might say no to RFK? Yeah, this is an interesting question, JVL, because I appreciate that report for Lucy. And

And I have been thinking about it myself. And you got to admit, you got to update your priors when you miss something. I thought Gates was going to get through. I did. And so a piece of information has been delivered to me that is making me rethink what did I have wrong.

And the answer could be simply that Gates is so noxious personally and that they were able to do this privately so they didn't actually have to show backbone. They just got to show private backbone like when they talked to Bob Costa. Bob Costa's like, GOP senators are whispering. They're unhappy about this. They kind of got to do that, get rid of Gates while still just being on background. So maybe it's just that.

Or maybe they are looking at this differently and seeing Trump as a lame duck. And to Sarah's point, if maybe Mitch McConnell is like Yosemite Mitch right now and he's like, F you guys. And if you get Collins and Murkowski and McConnell, you can stop basically anything. You just need one other person. It could be a different one person every time. Maybe there might be more constraints than I expected. Which side of that do you fall down on? Like you, I thought there was likely something

That Gates would be confirmed. And this has me questioning that as well. I don't think we know what the answer is yet. Yeah. Because it could be one of three things. It could be that the Gates thing is just personal animus, that they just hated Matt Gates so much. Yeah. And that, uh,

Also, they viewed Matt Gaetz as bad for the Republican Party, which is a thing that they do care about. They don't care about the country so much, but they do care about the Republican Party. It could be that, isn't it, that they had real objections and that they were willing to stand up to Trump because they could do it without voting on it. As you say this, because they're working in the shadows, they were able to kill the nomination without anybody having to actually put their asses on the line. Right.

Or it could be that maybe they really are taking this stuff seriously and they're going to be willing to draw the line on...

which are really, really bad, of which the other three are Tulsi, RFK, and Hegseth, all of which are very, very bad. Matt Whitaker for NATO ambassador doesn't qualify for you? The big dick toilet man for NATO ambassador? If you want to... Three and a half. Three and a half, I guess. I mean, does that even really count? I don't know. Linda McMahon is totally unqualified to be the...

of education. Dr. Oz? No, compared to, I mean, those are, they are in an entirely separate category. Okay, yeah. There are three others that are really bad and in positions of like grave importance to the system. But the question of should, you know, is it good that Gates went down? I think the answer is unambiguously yes.

That doesn't mean that his replacement will be much better. But, you know, would Pam Biondi be 1% better? Yes, I think so. I want to get into Bondi, but I guess that does go to your question, to Sarah's question, though. Do you want it to be better or do you want it to be worse? What I want is I want it to be better at the power ministries. And so this is why I...

Sam doesn't like this, but I have no problems with RFK. I think RFK should just sail on through. I think he should do all the crazy shit he thinks.

and people should discover when they take their children to their five-year-old. It looks like Sarah's on Sam's side of that for people who are just on audio only. For their five-year-old checkups and the doctors aren't even allowed to offer the MMR vaccine. Parents should be like, wait a minute, isn't it time to do the polio vaccine? The doctors should say, sorry, we don't do that anymore. Parents can go, what the fuck?

I think that's what America needs. Okay, but do you think America needs an outbreak of polio? Like, does it need a return? Okay. So, and this is, can I just say, you know, you know, you know, who's, whose life was saved by the polio vaccine? Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell. Yeah. Yeah.

I bet there's one more. That's not actually true. He was like one of the last people to come through before the vaccine, but his life was impacted by polio. Okay. But at the level of DOD and justice, those are two posts where these guys could have made the continuation of democracy itself very contingent. And so...

We should attempt to deny Trump that power. You're just looking at the tail outcomes, right? Yeah. You're basically saying, right, like, look, if the thing that we absolutely need to do is make sure the Republic survives, what you don't want is people in DOJ and DOD that might go along with a Trump coup in 2028 if he tried to do it. So even if you only think that's a 5% chance or a 2% chance, like you still want to anything that moves that number down from four to three to whatever or whatever your number is.

is better and and doj and dod are the main slots where that could happen that's basically what you're saying yes jbl raises an interesting point here though because so pam bondy i don't think is one percent better i think she's significantly better on a scale still of terrible but what's interesting about jbl i'm sorry i just meant is she one percent or greater no no i didn't mean she's only one okay i know i'm sorry that's not that's not really my point my point is

I actually don't trust Pam Bondi for one second to defend against a Trump coup. I don't. However, the idea of Matt Gaetz, who was clearly going to get indicted or have a report showing that he was sex trafficking women. He was paying young women who were underage, taking them across state lines for like sex parties, etc.

That he was going to be in charge of prosecuting sex crimes? Like this is where I sort of feel like people might not be paying enough attention to the idea of having these people who assault women, who are horrible to women. Allegedly. Allegedly. I'm just trying to, you know, Pam Bondi's coming. Pam Bondi might be 1% better than Matt Gaetz, but she's not 1% less likely to indict you.

So just FYI. Not 1% less likely to indict me personally? Yeah. She'll come after us too. Target political foes for whatever. This is why I'm saying like what's crazy about the scale of badness that JVL is laying out is that I would take her over Matt Gaetz in part because like whoever's the part at AG is going to have to prosecute like the P. Diddy case.

sex trafficking horribleness. Matt Gaetz is going to let him off. Can you imagine if Matt Gaetz had been prosecuting this? Like, anyway. I don't know. Diddy's black. Yeah. You raise a good point. You're making great points. I don't know. I just think maybe he could let him off, but who knows? I don't know. I just really wish people would think about

The idea of him being our nation's biggest law enforcement person at a time, like at least she, not only was he unqualified, but everything he did is like flies in the face of the law. Whereas at least she was AG of Florida.

A lot of our listeners might not know a lot about Pam Bondi. If you are not a watcher of Fox, you'll be surprised to learn that Pam Bondi is on Fox a lot. It's just the key criteria for this cabinet. If you're not a watcher of Fox or not, we're not like super engaged in politics between 2014 and 16, or she was more of a main character. You might not know her. So I want to play people a couple of throwbacks. You get a sense for how much better the better option is. Let's listen to Pam Bondi at the 2016 Donald Trump convention.

By the way, she deserves no security clearance. Hillary, she's talking about her. You become president of the United States when you have no security clearance. Such a good question. This lawlessness must stop right here, right now. Yes. Donald Trump will stop it. Lock her up. I love that.

So that's what we're turning to on the politicization of the Justice Department. I've got a couple more clips, but any initial reactions to that? I mean, I don't know. She sounds great. She's in favor of the rule of law. So here's Pam Bondi last year, 15 months ago, in August of 2023, talking about what an incoming Trump administration should do with regards to prosecutions.

The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated because the deep state last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows, but now they have a spotlight on them and they can all be investigated. So the investigators will be investigated. Prosecutors will be prosecuted. Lock up Hillary Clinton.

I mean, not great, Sarah. I don't know. Better than Gates, but not great. Yeah, it is bad. Can I tell you one thing that has made me, this is going back to your senator's question, and like, could they maybe stand up? One of the things that we saw, Caputo was reporting this about how Gates said, I'm not going to do things like investigate Liz Cheney.

Now, he felt compelled to come out with that statement because he's going into senators' offices who are like, if you do this shit, I'm not going to confirm you. Sorry, I swore for the second time. That cheered me up slightly because it means that the senators are providing some decent litmus tests for these candidates saying, you do not go prosecute Liz Cheney. Like, you're not going to do that. You say, if you're going to do that, we're not confirming you. So I do think it looks like they may rest significantly.

some assurances out of these people that they will not go full Banana Republic.

And they'll probably do it in a way that's gross. Like, you will not behave like Democrats and prosecute your political enemies. I feel like I've heard people tell senators that they won't do things like have litmus tests on abortion or that they will respect stare decisis. And that once they get the job, they're not really... These aren't legally bound promises. They aren't signing in their own blood on a contract, right? Yeah, I guess Sarah's point is simply that

the prospect that they're concerned about oversight from the Senate is preferable to an alternative world that we all... I think if you quizzed us, everybody on this podcast, I guess I won't speak for anybody else, on the Wednesday after the election and were like,

Is the Senate just going to totally roll over for this guy and let him do whatever he wants? I would have thought, yeah, probably. Right. And so even if we've had some signals in the ensuing two weeks that there will be some things they won't roll over for, that is an improvement, I guess, is all Sarah's saying. Right. Yeah. I'm just saying that I don't view something a candidate says privately to a senator in their office as

as anything other than Kabuki theater. Maybe, but to Tim's point, I thought that they very likely would go do recess appointments. Like it seemed like it was heading in that direction. And now it actually seems- Boone said he was going to do it. Right? And now it seems like they are intent on hearings where they get to say some things. And I think that you're going to see public hearings, a bunch of Republican senators saying,

get assurances publicly that they will not go prosecute political enemies. Now, it'll be interesting because there's a lot of Republicans, a majority of Republicans, who want them to prosecute political enemies, right? There's a bunch of unserious clowns in there now. But the upside to having a narrow majority is that

With just a handful of Republicans, you can do a lot of damage now. And so the question is not – and this is where you do get – go back to Sarah circa 2018 where it's like, can you get five? Because if you can get five, which by the way, really good that we still have that filibuster. Yeah, and I don't even know if it's actually more than half that want political targeting. You forget that like the Senate –

If you go look at a Senate roster, if you haven't done that in a while, like there's an insane number of Republican senators who have just disappeared since Donald Trump came along. Like Mike Crapo was on TV yesterday and I was like, is he a former senator? Is he still in the Senate? Yes, Mike Crapo is still in the Senate. Like who, like is Mike Rounds still in the Senate?

I'm surprised he's still in the Senate. Right. Like Roger Wicker is apparently still in the Senate. I saw him in an elevator yesterday. And so there's a lot of these people that like will go along with 95 percent of Trump stuff. But like I get when you get to things like worst case scenario type things.

Open question. I'm not saying that they won't. I'm not saying they will. But more of an open question on worst-case scenario type situations. That's great, though, right? Yeah, no, that's good. What's his name who did the immigration bill? Lankford is there. I was just talking about the imaginary ones. But yeah, also Lankford. People mention Tillis and Lankford, I guess what I'm saying. There's an additional cadre of people that are not MAGA, that have been there forever, that have gray hair, and have just basically shut up. They're like, I'm happy to be a senator.

I like the people from my state come to my office and suck up to me. And I, you know, get to ride in the cop cars from the airport and they escort me. You know what I mean? Like that's what they're there to do. And they vote on their, you know, parochial issues. Anyway, I'll have one more Pam Bondi because I want to take us back down a little bit though to worst case scenarios because people might not remember this. Let's play Pam Bondi in Pennsylvania somewhere near Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

It is about the integrity of this election and every vote, as Mayor Giuliani said, in every state must be counted fairly. We need to fix this, we need to remedy this now because we've won Pennsylvania and we want every vote to be counted in a fair way.

Just to be clear, that was in 2020, not in 2024. We should talk about how we, being the Trump campaign, have won Pennsylvania. I don't even know how much needs to be said about this, but it should be disqualifying that the incoming attorney general was an active member of the attempted coup in 2020. But I guess that we don't even like that almost doesn't bear mentioning anymore at this point. It should be disqualifying that the guy who did the coup can't be president again.

So I don't know that we need to continue on that anymore. It says so in the constitution. This is more of, I feel like we should at least play that for the listeners. I don't know how much more can be said about it.

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the doge department yes our oligarch elon musk is in charge of i guess he's maybe in the he's not he's quasi in the government he's weighing in on the attorney general he's also a government contractor he's also a donor he's also trying to intimidate republican senators to go along like he's wearing a lot of hats but you wrote a little bit about doge and and they've kind of put out some early

And outlines of their plans for government efficiency. And I'm for government efficiency. So I was like, maybe I'll like some of this. But your newsletter indicated maybe I'm not going to like it as much as I thought. So why don't you talk about it?

So, DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is a joke. Not a real department. Not a real department. Is it a real department or not? No. Because it's already up and running, right? It has a logo.

And Elon isn't doing any of that. He has said that people who want to apply for jobs just have to send a direct message on Twitter. Cool. Okay. Cool. Also,

You have to pay Elon Musk in order to have the ability to send direct messages on Twitter because only verified accounts can do that. I think that that is the sort of pay to play thing that various federal hiring regulations would probably preclude.

But the idea is that, you know, they're going to slash headcount is what he and Vivek are saying. The headcount is where they're at. They're really, you know, they're going to get in there with their green eyes, shades. And these are guys who know how to make things happen. This is nonsense. So payroll for federal employees is roughly $290 billion a year. That represents 5%.

percent of the federal budget. So if you fired literally every single government worker, you would save 5%. It's just Trump...

It's just Elon is an unpaid volunteer as his viceroy. It's literally Trump just wandering around the White House by himself, right? And like, where's the money spent? The money is spent on defense, debt service, and entitlements, mostly Social Security and Medicare. And so anybody who is actually interested. It's important to say Medicaid because that's what's actually going to end up getting. And Medicaid. And Medicaid.

if somebody was like actually concerned with government efficiency and figuring out how to streamline the budget and stuff, then you have to, to start there. That's where all of the money is spent. And the fact that that is not even something that, you know, there, Elon is, is asking some progressive YouTuber for his ideas on how to cut the defense department. I'm just like, great. Okay, good luck. Um,

But it isn't serious. It is an elaborate... I mean, A, it's an elaborate joke because Elon Musk is obsessed with a meme coin known as Dogecoin. Which is a dog, a picture of a dog. It looks like the Paw Patrol logo. It's a Paw Patrol dog. It looks like a children's cartoon. Yes.

And this is also the logo for his department, right? So the Department of Doge has the same logo as the Dogecoin. I just want to just cut that last 15 seconds and like send it in a time capsule to somebody from the past. So Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that Elon Musk has long championed.

And at first it was kind of a joke that he championed it, but then it wasn't. And it's like the only currency you can buy Tesla stuff with. And he frequently does his thing where he talks about Dogecoin on the Twitters and then watches the value of Dogecoin goes up. I love capitalism. Elon is also, we believe...

A large scale, a whale, as they say in the business, which is, say, somebody who holds a large percentage of Dogecoin. I mean, we're talking real money. The total market cap of Dogecoin is $55 billion. And so if Elon owns like, I don't know, a tenth of Dogecoin, that's $5 billion. It's real money. And so the weirdness of having this guy who is using the government money.

As a joking way to help increase that. And, you know, when he announced the Department of Doge, the price of Dogecoin went up. Oh, you're kidding. It's one of the most corrupt things I've ever seen in my life.

And he's using this quasi government appointment to then get people to pay him money to apply for jobs with. Yeah, I understand. Like, whoa, he's worth $300 billion. He doesn't need any more money. Well, you know what? Fuck you. Like this is, you know, then he shouldn't be trying to use the government to make more money if he has enough.

Sorry. My only thought on this, because I don't know anything about Doge and I almost fall asleep during cryptocurrency conversations, which is crazy because I like being a degenerate gambler and things. You'd think this would appeal to me, but I can't get myself to care about it. But here's what I hear. So as a creature of Twitter for a long time...

I watched Elon Musk come into the company and do just this thing, right? He just like, he just went for skulls. How many skulls can we kill in the words of what's his name from succession? How many skulls do I get? Right. So they get rid of everybody and they're like, see, look how great it's going to run without all these people. You don't need all these people.

And then what happens to Twitter? It is overrun with sex bots and Russian trolls. Revenue down 90%. Yeah. Like he destroyed it. He destroyed it as a public forum through which discourse thrived. He destroyed it as like a usable platform and he turned it into sort of a scammy pay for play like thing.

And as a business. Right. Again, the most important thing, he destroyed it as a business. Yeah. Twitter was a breakeven concern, and now it is just a sink for money. Which is why he needs to make the new money on these other things, because he's got to figure out how to pay off all the Twitter losses. But anyway, my point is that if he seems to take the same approach to the government as he did to Twitter, I don't know that I think the outcomes – and look, you can get me excited about this.

about trimming the government down. Government efficiency. But the idea that Elon Musk is going to do it in some way that is useful or productive is silly. All of it's silly, right? It's all completely unserious. The basic question is fundamentally, is this the wall again? Where they fire a couple people and then say it was the greatest reduction in government staffing in history and it is the best and now we have the most efficient run government in the entire world.

or do they actually cause harm? Or is there actual real departments within the government that get totally slashed, and so they're real worlds? Why can't it be both? I guess it could be both.

I guess it's a sliding scale is what I mean. Yeah. As far as like, do they cut so few people that there's not any real harm and there's a lot of press releases and a lot of tweets about it? Or do they actually like cut things to the point where, you know, the FAA is not, does not have the data that they need anymore or whatever. You know, you could pick any random government service. We don't know is the answer and we'll find, we will find out. But my guess is that this will be part of the,

the effort to transform the federal government into a personal tool of Donald Trump and that the people they will cut will be at key switches in

Like, you know, and choke points within the government and the cutting them will really be just an excuse to eliminate a person who is a nonpartisan bureaucrat so that they can then move somebody into, you know, like you eliminate the position, but then you recreate another position, which is exactly the same thing. But it's staffed by a political appointee.

So I think that's probably where we're headed. Like the FAA doesn't get cut, but somebody over at the FDA who was going to carry out his function diligently and has a lot of institutional knowledge gets pushed out so you can get a MAGA person in there.

All right. I have one more piece of JVL bait, and then we've done no Democratic reflection on this podcast, so I want to end on that. But before we do, while we're having fun with Doge, because in some ways in my mind, these stories are connected, just kind of the absurdity of the oligarchs supporting Trump. There's a Wall Street Journal story this morning.

My father hasn't sent it to me yet. I'm just waiting. And the headline is this. Trump's oil and gas donors don't really want to drill, baby, drill. Fossil fuel tycoons helped return the president-elect to Washington. Now they're seeking to lock in use of their product for years to come. This is my favorite quote. I know this guy, Brian Sheffield.

Quote, our stocks will be absolutely crushed if we start growing our production the way Trump is talking about, said Brian Sheffield, a Texas oil man who contributed more than a million to Trump's latest campaign. It's like the whole bit, the whole, the liquid gold. Remember the liquid gold that we talked about? The whole thing, like the Biden administration, the libs and the socialists were preventing us.

from getting our liquid gold right underneath our feet. And we just needed Donald Trump to unleash it. And all the oil guys are going to give him millions to his campaign so he can help unleash it. Now that they've got it and the dog has caught the car and the other guy's like, wait a minute, we don't want to, we like the liquid gold where it is actually. That is how we maximize our profits.

So JBL, I just kind of wanted to give you a two minute hate on that topic. Yeah, it's a, it's a great thing because what, what they really wanted from him is they wanted him to do a bunch of regulatory stuff adjacent to energy production in order to lock in fossil fuel usage for the longterm, which is funny in a way because it's going to be locked in longterm anyway. Um,

Oil is incredibly useful. And if it didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. But the extent to which these guys are now like shitting themselves over the prospect of the things that Trump is going to do, like tariffs. There's another line in here where he's just like, if he does tariffs, price of steel is going to go up. And that means we can't build fracking stuff and the stuff we need to. It's going to drive up all of our costs. This is really bad. We got to stop him from doing tariffs.

Like no shit, dude. So they're, they're terrified about trap about tariffs. They are really, really against raising production. They don't want to raise production because then prices will fall. And, uh, I just want you guys not to worry because the end of the day,

Brian Sheffield is going to be all right, I think. One of the quotes further down in the piece says that they were they're very concerned about their as they're talking with the incoming Trump administration about tariffs. They say, you know, we're really worried that if you have tariffs, it could make the price of gas here in America domestically go up.

And then there's like a blind quote from Trump and some Trump administration staffers like, yeah, no, we really care about that, too. Don't worry. So I think these guys will ultimately get everything they want and nothing they don't, because that's the way in America with our new oligarch class. To me, the thing that I love about it is like the degree to which the Trump support at elite levels. And we're gonna get to the working class folks next, but at elite levels, right?

Like the Trump support is almost entirely predicated on people not believing he was going to do what he said he's going to do. Yes. And this is the thing that just bugs me personally. I know we're getting into feelings on the secret podcast. We'll just give a little tease right here is like,

That's why the devil inside of me wants him to do the things that he said he was going to do. Oh, I want the tariffs. And there's just this tension inside me that everyone is going to be able to listen to over the next four years. I want RFK and I want tariffs. Believe me. Yeah, which is like, I don't want to. It'd be good if they didn't do tariffs, but these fuckers deserve tariffs. They deserve it.

They deserve 15 million deportations. I know. I know. I know. It's tough. It's tough. It's a tension inside of me. But Sarah, I want to talk about the Democratic side of this coin with you, unless you have any thoughts on the oilman keeping the liquid gold under our feet.

Only to remind JBL, lest he want to do this later, that crony capitalism is not capitalism and that under Trump, all capitalism will be crony capitalism. There we go. I kind of disagree with. I know you do. I know you do. I wanted to end the main version of the podcast with this topic because I was listening to our friends over at Pond Save America.

Dan Pfeiffer's interview with Jon Tester. And I was like, this section of this interview is going to warm Sarah's cockles. And I know that she was in Europe. She was in Italy, I don't know, listening to whatever lesbian podcasts that you listen to, not politics podcasts. And so she probably didn't hear this. And so I'm going to play it for her. Let's listen to Jon Tester. You know, Democrats always pride themselves in being the party of the working man and woman. We might be trying to sell that, but they ain't buying it.

And and so I think that, you know, things like giving away money to people who really didn't do anything to earn it is not something that people buy. And it's not something that I personally buy either. By the way, I think you appreciate the money you've earned. You don't appreciate money that's given to you.

And by the way, instead of giving loan forgiveness for college education, let's figure out how to reduce costs for college education for everybody. You know, lower the rates so you get the bank rate on all our college loans and make it retroactive for everybody that's got a college loan. So you're not just picking out a select few at this moment in time and saying, you know what?

You guys are going to get your loans forgiven and everybody else that paid for their loans or people who are going to come up later and have loans aren't going to get advantage of that. I think people see that as patently unfair and I think it hurts Democrats. Got to tell you, Sarah, there's a lot of discussion since you've been gone on what Democrats need to do. And there's a lot of, you know, gosh, they got to moderate on cultural issues or we need economic populism. We need to do the full Bernie. We need to do socialism. I was listening to John Tester and I was like,

Democrats used to sound like that guy. That's what Bill Clinton sounded like. And it worked. And they don't there aren't any Democrats that sound like that anymore. Maybe that should also be another option to consider. You know, like many artists that I like, you know, Zach Bryan. Ani DiFranco. No, no, no. Usually the male ones. I would like to cancel Bill Clinton, the man. But I would like to recapture.

his political centrism, his way of talking to working class voters. And here's the thing. So people will be annoyed at me. First of all, I'm going to miss Jon Tester, miss Jon Tester in the Senate. Sad that he lost. But the thing that Democrats are going to have to get their heads around is that, and I think that this is where something,

As we sort of have a longer conversation, it's too much to get into right now, but about the political realignment where Democrats are now capturing more of these college educated voters and they're losing these working class voters of all races and ethnicities, is that people forget how few college educated voters there are.

Right. Like you just you max out on them at some point, like most of them, probably close to 100 percent of them voted in this last election, whereas there is an almost endless supply. I think it's like 70, 30, 30 percent college educated, 70 percent working class, non-college. I think it's less than that. But among non-voters and non-non-voters, that's a huge gap.

So like one of the things that we kept asking as an unknown, as we thought about this election was like, is there more squeeze in there? Can they get more juice out of these non-college voters? And the answer was yes. And so Democrats are going to have to figure out how to compete for non-college voters. And I think that there's a lot of people who think like, well, that means throwing trans people under the bus or not really. It's sort of the inverse of...

what I think some of the ideas were that were driving democratic strategy this election, which was they basically had the idea of like, well, we're just not going to talk about the issues on which we're vulnerable, like immigration. We're going to change the subject to places where, you know, we're in good shape. No, you got to talk to people about jobs. You can talk about protecting trans people, but you don't have to say it's the great civil rights issue of our time, because I'm not sure that's true. But like, more importantly, it's

More importantly, people are, I don't want to set it up like it's a binary between like defending trans people and attracting working class voters. I think that's a false choice. It's not what we're thinking about.

Talk about jobs. Talk about people's earning potential. Talk about helping them get a leg up. Focus on that relentlessly, and then you'll have less time to do the things that are damaging you. The idea that you wouldn't focus and talk in language that working class people understand. We make fun of Donald Trump and the way that he talks, and we should. It's stupid.

But like, we also should be aware, and this is what I like about doing the focus groups, that he has made politics accessible to a lot more people who just feel like they understand what he's talking about when he's talking about politics in a way where they don't understand what Democrats are talking about. I think that there is a binary, though, that's not the binary you gave.

And that is we're going to keep having to discuss about how the Democrats talk to working class people. There's a there's a big movement among the Democratic coalition to be like the answer is to give them more free stuff to do more so to do more socialism. And Jon Tester is offering the counter example, which is more of a 90s style democratic application.

Economic message. I want to have more, particularly on the cultural side of this and on the trans question and how that has become kind of weirdly central to the conversation over in the secret podcast. But JVL, I want to give you a last word on this.

I want to say two things. The first is that on the matter of what do the Democrats need to do, I believe very, very strongly that we don't know the answer. Nobody knows the answer. And most of what you hear, not here, we're actually very good about this at the Bulwark, but out there in the world is people saying the Democrats need to do this thing that I like and then they'll do better. And we don't know that that's true.

Secondly, I listen to Tester and I just don't think that that's correct. When he says that, you know, people don't like the idea of people being given free money, that's not true. People love the idea of being given free money to them. Right.

And this is why you didn't hear anybody complaining about the Trump bucks. Do you remember those checks that Donald Trump put his signature on? Do you remember all of the spending Trump did? All of the infrastructure spending that Biden did? You know, people are showing up. All of his, you know, all the Republicans were showing up in their districts to those ribbon cuttings and taking credit for that stuff. What they don't like is they don't like money going to groups who they don't like.

And so that's why, like when we talk about spending, the thing that always comes up is the student loan forgiveness, which again is a very small, small number, but it's the idea of who is getting that, that they hate.

Right. They love the idea that a bridge is going to be built in their district. They think that's great. They love the idea of getting rural broadband Internet. That's great. They love their Social Security and their disability checks, and they want the government to do more against fentanyl. They like what they get. They want to get theirs.

But they really don't like it when others get it. And you see this with like the child tax credit, right? So, I mean, Biden did the big pro-family thing that Republicans have been talking about for 25 years. And when he did it, Republicans suddenly hated it. Why? Because some of the money might be going to brown people.

who had babies. I can tell in Sarah's body language that she disagrees with us and that's why it's a good teaser for you guys to come join us on The Secret Podcast. I want to talk about that. I want to talk about some of the feedback we've been getting on this question around how important the trans issue was

in the election. Mostly, though, we want to talk about our feelings and our fears. JVL wrote a beautiful triad yesterday, headlined, referencing my favorite Catholic hymn, Be Not Afraid. We've been texting about this in order to be talking about whether we're afraid, whether we should be afraid, whether you're afraid, how you should deal with your fears.

And I hope you'll come join us with that on the traditional Friday Secret Podcast with Sarah and JVL. Everybody else, we'll see you back here on Monday with Bill Kristol. Thanks to Sarah and JVL for doing double duty. We'll see you soon. Peace. I love the quiet of the night time When the sun is drowned in a deathly sleep I can feel my heart beating as I speed through

The sense of time catching up with me Well I see it, who's driving anyway? I picture my grave 'Cause fear's gotta hold on me Yes, this fear's gotta hold on me Yes, this fear's gotta hold on me Yes, this fear's got Yes, this Yes, this Yes, this fear