Election Denial: A Roundtable
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This is honestly. All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they're doing, and stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved.

Ever since the attack on the Capitol on January 6th of last year. I've struggled with how to think about that day. Ma'am, what happened to you?

Specifically with how seriously to take the Stop the Steal movement. And the broader trend among many Americans who appear to be losing faith in the legitimacy of our elections. And here's why I struggle.

The American news media, every single day, makes a new claim that we are living through a five-alarm fire, a threat-level midnight situation. One day it's guns, the next day it's the courts, the next day it's the border. Not the border. It's schools, it's race, it's social media. It's that the world is melting down from climate change and there's nothing we can do. And just the relentless, over-the-top hyperbole, day in and day out, is what's happening.

has created a situation where it's hard to know when an emergency is actually an emergency. It's hard to know when the danger is real.

And lately, this spotlight has been cast on American democracy itself. In the battle to save this American experiment with multiracial democracy, there is one party that's standing up for small-D democracy. And then there's the party of open hostility to democracy, and that's the Republican Party. And on the Republican side, it is some scary and kind of unnerving stuff about whether or not they are a party that endorses democracy.

and whether they are a party that still believes that democracy and elections are the way that we decide things as a country. In one corner of American politics, we're being told that the Republican Party is trying everything it can do to keep Americans from voting. As our democratic norms erode within America, we must wonder, will this democracy survive? We're being told that we're entering an era worse than Jim Crow. This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle. The attack on voting rights, the attack on civil rights.

The gerrymandering has made our elections illegitimate, that the Senate is anti-democratic. The Senate is not a democratic institution. And by the way, so is the Supreme Court. The authoritarian takeover of our nation will be made legal by the Supreme Court. Perhaps when you build a nation on stolen land with stolen labor, it was never going to be a republic we could keep.

And in the other corner of American politics, many Americans are just straight up saying, like the Texas Republican Convention put it last month, we reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election. And we hold that acting President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States. Stop the steal! Stop the steal! Stop the steal!

Depending on what polls you look at, a majority or close to a majority of Republicans right now think that Trump was cheated out of a fair election in 2020. And many of them just straight up think he won. So for today, a roundtable where we try our best to understand just how worried we should be about the current state of the Republican Party and the future of American democracy.

My guests today are Kristen Soltis Anderson, partner at Echelon Insights, a pollster who focuses on the Republican Party, and the author of The Selfie Vote, Where Millennials Are Leading America and How Republicans Can Keep Up.

Joining her is Jonah Goldberg, lifelong conservative, columnist and founder of The Dispatch, and author most recently of the book Suicide of the West, How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy.

Last but not least is Jeremy Peters, New York Times reporter who covers media, politics, and the law. Jeremy is the author of the new book, Insurgency, How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.

We get into a lot in this conversation. What are the claims actually being made about fraud in the 2020 election? Which of them are true? Which of them are bunk? We talk about whether or not we're on the brink of a civil war, if the media is making everything worse, if the January 6th hearings are helping restore trust or hurt it, and ultimately, whether or not we think America is on the brink of disaster and what we can all do to save it. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Jeremy, Jonah, Kristen, thank you all so much for being here with me today. Thank you. Great to be here. Thank you. Okay. Regardless of where we all fall on the spectrum politically, I think we can all agree that there's a lot of hyperbole and exaggeration and fear-mongering, frankly, going on in the culture right now. And the thing that I hear the most about is the end of American democracy. And I think a lot of people hear that, frankly, and roll their eyes. I want to help us get past that noise and

and hype, and actually look at what's really going on on the ground in America. So here's where I want to start. Poll after poll continues to show that a large number of Americans believe that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election. I want to understand what those people actually claim. And to do that, I think we need to get to the root of the claim, which comes from Donald Trump himself.

Jeremy, can you start us off by walking us through what former President Trump specifically has been saying about the 2020 presidential election over the past two years? So as I interviewed Trump, one of the things that I saw happen over the course of a couple of years is how much angrier and more detached from reality he became. If you count the legal votes, I easily win.

If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late,

We're looking at them very strongly, but a lot of votes came in late. This is a case where they're trying to steal an election. They're trying to rig an election. And this only accelerated once he left the White House. They're fed up with politicians who rig and steal our elections and our wealth, squander our strength and spill our blood. They have an endless list of propaganda and propaganda methods that nobody would believe, including hoaxes.

And demented lies. We had all of the hoaxes. The American people are sick of this entire rotten and wretched... I think there are probably two ways to look at the people who believe that there's something fishy going on in our election system. One are, you know, the true diehard Sidney Powell types who believe that Dominion voting system shaved votes off of Trump's totals.

And that's a much smaller percentage of the overall Republican Party. But the bigger and more problematic piece there are the people who say that there are problems. After facing deep divisions in the wake of the 2020 election, Republicans appear to be uniting around the issue of election integrity.

They use very euphemistic phrases like election integrity. It comes despite the fact that officials from local to federal said the past election was one of the most secure ever. And it's perpetuating this false idea that there really is something broken with the electoral system. And

that is done not by Trump and his, you know, his, his acolytes. That's done by more conventional Republicans who falsely claim that there's a problem with voting and it needs to be addressed through restrictive voting rights legislation. I've seen that same spectrum too, right? I've seen the people who,

basically say, look, the Stop the Steal people, the people that talk about a conspiracy between Mark Zuckerberg and China or Dominion, they're the Looney Tunes, right? They're the Antifa of our group. But...

I do think, and this is their argument, that the Democrats used the excuse of the pandemic to fundamentally change the mechanics of the election. And then the Democrats, you know, the party colluding with their friends in the media, successfully ring-fenced this subject. They made it so radioactive that even to mention the phrase, as you just said, election integrity, or to suggest that voters should have IDs, right?

turned you into a conspiracy theorist denying the election. I'd love for you to speak to that listener. You know, is there anything at all in the 2020 election that is cause for sincere, genuine concern?

Look, I'm a pretty passionate and committed person about making voting a more disciplined and uniform thing across the country. I have no problem with voter ID, but I was arguing for voter ID. Voter ID, as Kristen can testify, is quite popular with Americans, including among Democrats. I do think that there were things that were done in the lead up to the 2020 election that

in a normal environment are perfectly legitimate to gripe about in one way or another. The Pennsylvania courts made decisions about voting procedures that didn't leave the power to do that with the legislatures and all that. My position was that almost all of those changes were reasonable given the fact that we had a pandemic.

And even if you don't think that they were reasonable, the key point, which everyone seems to leave out, is that no Republicans complained in any serious way, like went to court.

to try and change those procedures in any sort of systemic or serious way. I'm sure some lawyers showed up and said, we'd like to do this or that. But it was only after they lost that Republicans claimed all of these rule changes were illegitimate and evil. If they had won, they would never had any problem with it. And in the law, the time to complain about the rule changes is before the election.

You can't retroactively say, hey, the system was rigged when you had every opportunity to contest those changes at the time.

And so there's a lot of sort of retconning and retroactive rewriting about this stuff. I do think, look, the stuff that Mark Zuckerberg was doing about getting out the vote and all that kind of stuff, there's some there there. And is it some sinister evil plot where they're going to sap off our precious bodily fluids? No. But is it something that's a legitimate thing to argue about? Yeah, absolutely. But –

I think one of the problems is that— Jonah, when you say there's some there there, do you mean like, you know, why are we living in a country in which a billionaire has so much influence over the elect—what do you mean when you say that? I just want to be specific. It's a perfectly contestable thing to complain about in the realm of politics in the same way that the left complains about what the Koch brothers do in terms of, you know, voter initiatives or whatever. Right.

But the broader point is that one of the things that made things worse is that, and I'm a real both sides guy, right? I think both sides suck. So in the wake of the election, a lot of Democrats went to the shelf and grabbed their standard issue, longstanding voter reform agenda, which was the same agenda they had before the pandemic. Right.

and read from a script about how there was widespread voter repression or suppression in the 2020 election. It was the biggest turnout election, I think, in American history, at least certainly in absolute numbers, and arguably in 100 years in percentage numbers. There was not meaningful voter suppression any more than there was meaningful rigging of anything. And so they stayed on this script, and then when some places did what I think is utterly reasonable—

which is to say, hey, look, we bent the rules so that people could safely vote during a pandemic. And now we're going to go back to the rules we had prior to the pandemic and get rid of drive-through voting or drop boxes and that kind of thing. You may think those are bad policies because the left is very much bought into the idea that maximizing the convenience of voting is always good. I don't agree with that. But it is not Jim Crow 2.0 to go back to the rules that got Barack Obama elected.

And so in many ways, both sides are talking past each other. I think it's sort of important to keep in mind that as harebrained and as stupid as I think the big lie stuff is and how deeply cynical and dangerous it is, and how as much as I disagree with a lot of the voting reforms from the left, it's worth taking a step back and saying both sides here are actually arguing about how they like democracy.

There are very few – I mean, yeah, the Proud Boy Peckerwood types and a few other weird theorist types who are talking about how liberalism doesn't suit us anymore and democracy is a problem and yada, yada, yada. But the average run-of-the-mill super-Trumper is still talking about

how we need to save democracy, not that we need to destroy it. And a lot of the media coverage of this is that there's the pro-democracy side on the left and there's the anti-democracy side on the right. And I don't think that actually captures the animating spirit of where the argument actually is. Kristen, you live the life of a pollster. So give us a sense, when you look at, you know, the Republican Party, when you look at half the country,

What are you hearing from them about what they think about the 2020 election? Do they think in the main that the election was stolen? Are they more on the Dominion, Sidney Powell, Steve Bannon side of it? Or are they on the election integrity side? What are their specific claims?

So most Republicans do believe that there was at least something fishy about the 2020 election. For some great sort of color around this, I did some focus groups for The New York Times right ahead of January 6th, 2022, asking a whole host of questions about how they felt about what happened on January 6th, etc. And at one point, my co-moderator, Patrick Healy,

from the opinion section there, just asked my participants who, in my view, were pretty representative of a broad spectrum of Republicans. They were not all super Trumpers, but said, just show of hands, how many of you think Joe Biden won the election fair and square? And of my, I believe it was about eight participants, only one raised her hand.

Now, there were no conversations in this focus group about, oh, well, Dominion voting machines or, you know, it wasn't really about particular specific claims so much as a sense that

The other side is willing to do whatever it takes to win. And this is something that you see, I think, in both sides in our politics today. It is a big piece of what our polarization these days is all about. It's not that half of America believes one set of facts and the other half of America believes another set of facts or that they all hold two very different sets of issue positions.

but rather it's that Americans these days view the other side as having much more power and much more willingness to exercise that power to harm the interests of people like them. And so from a Republican perspective, it's,

You don't even necessarily need a voter to have a specific and clear and credible claim of here is where something went wrong with the election for them to be willing to believe that, sure, I believe that Democrats or the media or whomever we're talking about would be willing to do whatever it takes to ensure their own position. In the same way that you would hear Democrats say that about Republicans.

that Republicans are willing to bend the rules, break the rules, do whatever it takes to hang on to power in unjust ways.

So you're saying it's less about specific claims of fraud, but more about a general sense that the other side will do anything it takes, and therefore we don't trust them. There's a sense that something is a little bit amiss. And their enemy is so all-powerful. Yeah. Right? That seems to be a critical part of it. I think that's a huge piece of it. And it only really works if Americans themselves feel very powerless. And so when someone like Donald Trump comes along and says—

Republicans, your party is weak. I'm going to make them strong. Or when someone comes along and says, aren't you sick of Democratic leaders who consistently roll over and, you know, I'm going to fight the fight, I see in polling this desire for leaders who will fight the fight is very strong. I think you couple that with

What was mentioned earlier, you talked about sort of ring fencing this issue, that there was so much discussion of there was no voter fraud. And that's a very bold and absolute statement. And therefore, all it takes is one example of something on squirrely. And frequently, many of these examples are coming up are Trump supporters who were trying to prove that voter fraud is real and then get caught.

But when doing it... But that's... It's an interesting point that, like, this...

This has always been there, this sentiment that the other side is cheating. This did not start with Donald Trump. One of my favorite stories is after the 2012 election, Roger Ailes, the former chairman and founder of Fox News, goes to visit Mitt Romney at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. And he says, you know, cheer up. Don't worry. The other side, they always cheat.

And, you know, Roger Ailes believed that. He filled Fox News airwaves with content that was about supposed voter fraud and the Democrats stealing the election for years, two decades before Donald Trump came onto the political scene. The only difference is that in Romney and the Bushes and McCain, you didn't have a leader of the

party who was a peddler of and believer in these voter fraud conspiracy theories. And Trump, interestingly enough, after the 2012 election, actually tweeted something about votes being stolen from Romney through nefarious voting machines. So this is not new in any sense of the word. It's what it is, is it just has a much more prominent purveyor in Donald Trump.

So I agree with that, certainly directionally. The Norm Coleman race where they found – I think it was Norm Coleman, right? Where they found a bunch of votes in a trunk for Al Franken. Those were kind of things where the only way voter fraud can work is in very tight, essentially local races. At the national level –

Finding 700 votes in a trunk means nothing, right? And part of it has to do with the way our brains work is that, I think Kirsten's point is a very good one, where if someone makes a blanket categorical statement, all you need is one contrary piece of evidence to say, well, now that statement is false. And then we extrapolate from that all sorts of things that can't be extrapolated from it. But I should also say the right has all sorts of problems with voter fraud, obsessions, and all that.

I'm old enough to remember the 2004 presidential race where I was getting inundated with stuff from the left about the Diebold machines were rigged by Dick Cheney and Colonel Sanders or whatever to deliver the election for George W. Bush. These things exist on the fringes of both parties. The problem is that particularly on the right these days, fringe views have – the Overton window has been moved to the point where –

Fringe views are legitimized. And when Donald Trump is the legitimizer in chief, it just makes it an order of magnitude difference. And differences of degree become differences in kind. And so there's a big chunk of the right that is bought into...

what should properly be a fever swamp fringe thing. And there's too little truth squatting in right-wing media to push back on it because of all the sort of cult of personality stuff. So I want to get a little bit deeper into the scale of the problem. Politico just released this new poll showing that over half of Republicans believe that something unseemly happened in the 2020 election. And the Politico poll ended with this quote,

Some Trump backers have told researchers that the more they hear reports that the election was fair, the more they believe that it wasn't. I think this is a good question for Jeremy, because I think that there's the evolution of the conspiracy theory was, OK, maybe Dominion bullshit.

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg bullshit. Maybe fraud at the ballot box bullshit. But what we know isn't bullshit is the fact that the mainstream media made Trump radioactive, and therefore the fraud is in the fact that the press, working with the Democratic Party, skewed the election. And for some, this is enough to say that the election was stolen because the media bears responsibility for lying to the public. So, Jeremy, not to put you too much on the spot, but...

To what extent do you see sort of the bias in the media playing into results like the ones that I just read to you from this Politico poll? It's a big problem, Barry. And I would just say that that percentage roughly tracks – I went back and I looked at Kristen's latest poll because she always asks this question.

Good question. Are you a party first Republican or a Trump Republican? And, you know, despite all of the stories in the mainstream media lately about how Trump is losing his grip on the Republican Party, and Kristen can correct me if I'm wrong here, but that number of people who said they're Republicans loyal to Donald Trump first and the party second has been pretty consistent.

over the last two years. It's bumped around, but it's been pretty consistent, right, Kristen? Yeah, I think the reports of Donald Trump's demise as the leader of the Republican Party, they are wildly premature. Yeah, so I think the mainstream media does own a part of this problem in that they, for four years, led...

to believe that Donald Trump was going to be hauled out of the White House in handcuffs at any minute. And it never happened. And so there's a certain credibility issue that the media has always had that I think has been amplified by the hyper-partisan nature of

the Trump presidency, and the way that he has demonized us in calling us the enemy of the people, despite the fact that he, more than any other president, has been reliant on the mainstream media and cozy with the mainstream media to further his political career. You know, what's so interesting to me, and I'll go back to this point again, is like this idea of a rigged system, whether you're talking, it's not just about voting, like it's about voting.

The media itself and the powers that be that are trying to supposedly suppress the voice of the average nowadays the Trump voter. But like in days past a Sarah Palin supporter, right? It's this idea that.

I remember from 2012, one of the big stories leading up to the election was this guy who claimed to unskew the polls. I don't know if anyone remembers this, but there was a big... Oh, I remember that guy. Yeah, it was all over conservative media. And this guy, he was just a fraud. He was some guy who...

was in his apartment in Virginia, and he claimed to have this statistical secret sauce that would decode the mainstream media's lying polls and show that actually Romney was in fact winning the election. There's a straight line from that kind of thinking

to the idea that, of course, Democrats are cheating because it's the only way they can win. And what effectively has happened is this idea that Democrats cheat because they can't get people to actually support their policies is now Donald Trump's idea that he reminds us of often. There's no way I can lose. The only way I'm losing is if the other side is cheating.

One thing I think a lot about, and I imagine you guys do too, is, you know, what happens when you make a lot of things unsayable?

When you make so much unsayable, what you do is you empower the people who will say it and say it in much more dangerous ways. You essentially create categories of like secret forbidden knowledge. So I wonder if, you know, you could choose many, many examples, but on this question, right, if there was a good faith open conversation, you know, about some of the things that

people who are inclined toward believing conspiracy theories about the election, if you had them in the mainstream in a more contained, trustworthy way, if the results would be different. Here's what I mean. To be able to talk about voter fraud in states, let's say like Pennsylvania, a state like Minnesota changing laws that govern voting at the last minute, to have an open conversation about voter ID laws that doesn't make it all about you're a racist that wants to reinstate Jim Crow, that's

Do you think that that would actually make a substantial difference in the number of people who are inclined toward believing that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president? I think it could make some difference. So let's take voter ID, for instance. As I think Jonah noted earlier, Jonah, you are correct in your reading of the polls. Voters very broadly supportive of something like requiring photo ID to vote.

And one way that we asked it in a poll that we conducted back in January was we didn't just want to ask would you support or oppose having voter ID, but we said do you believe that requiring photo ID to vote infringes on the right to vote? And a majority of Democrats, 58 percent, said no in addition to 77 percent of Republicans.

Things like requiring a photo ID or the last four digits of a social to vote by mail. You know, those are the sorts of things that we find very broad consensus around. Hey, this would be a good idea. This might give me some more confidence in elections. And when it's sort of dismissed as if you support this, not only are you wrong, but you are someone who is racist or wants to prevent people from voting.

That does kind of shut down that conversation and it leaves a voter who supports these policies thinking, well, wait a minute. This seems like common sense to me. Why wouldn't you want this in place? And it feels to them like the only reason you wouldn't want it in place is because you want it to be a porous policy.

voting system that you want there to be, you know, gaps in the system, you know, trying to explain that, well, there are certain communities that have been, you know, that they have had trouble getting the documents. And so that, that, that's just like not a conversation. Most voters go, I have to show my ID to do all kinds of stuff. You're telling me I shouldn't have to show it to vote. And if I even suggest that I think that that's important, that makes me a bad person. And that just shuts the conversation completely down.

Well, Barry, you raised something about a point about what you can't say. And I would just point out that we didn't see nearly as many stories in the mainstream media about

what elections looked like after these voter laws were passed versus the number of stories that you saw about what these laws were supposedly going to do and who they were going to disenfranchise when these laws were being passed a year ago. And if you look at a state like Georgia,

which was the focal point of all of our attention in the media after the election and when they were passing, what were no doubt wrongheaded measures that were punitive, that were aimed at, or the motivation appeared to be to keep certain people from voting. What happened in Georgia?

This year is that they had record turnout. And often this doesn't get said. It doesn't get said that major studies on voter ID laws have shown that they actually have the opposite effect.

effect of what they were intended to do and that's they drive up turnout on the Democratic side because they Rightfully feel those voters feel like they are trying to be boxed out of the electoral process So there's a lot of stuff going on here. I want I want to go back to the original question for just two seconds. I agree with your broader point your cosmic point barrier about when you make things unsaleable you empower people who Say them and particularly the people who say them in the most extreme way. I think that's absolutely true and

The example I've used for years at National Review, where I was for 20 years, our standard position was that immigration is a legitimate issue and that if politicians don't treat it as a legitimate issue, which means my standard line is when people ask me my preferred immigration policy, it's to have one.

And whatever the policy is, enforce it. But you can't have lawlessness. You can't have open borders. You can't have 100,000 legal immigrants and 200,000 illegal immigrants because it just makes people feel like they're suckers and they don't have agency and control over the system. So the position of NR was if you're not allowed to have a legitimate conversation about immigration, you're going to get –

irresponsible if you're not gonna have a responsible conversation about immigration you're going to get an irresponsible politician to pick up the issue yes and run wild with it because they're the only ones who are going to be you know getting what we're talking about and that's sort of what we had with donald trump and the demonization of people who you know like i may disagree with them on this or that specific but like

who say we should have a timeout or a quota or a fixed number or we should privilege people from certain countries, whatever. Those are legitimate points of view in every other major advanced industrialized country. And they are treated as if they are just beyond the pale and bigoted by a lot of people, by Democrats, by a lot of people in the media. And as a result, you got people who are willing to demagogue the issue.

The reason why I disagree with the premise of the question when it comes to elections is that this is a very special case insofar as Donald Trump is just a giant frigging industrial magnet next to the compass. And you can't – and to say, oh, if we just have this reasonable conversation about policy now where everything is permitted to be said in reasonable ways, it would fix everything –

attitudes are so hardened right now. By the way, I don't necessarily think it would fix everything. I was curious to see if you guys did. But my point is that this is one of these things where you just have to wait for the radioactivity to, you know, the half-life to go a little while so it becomes possible to have some of these conversations. My basic explanation about why we can't have nice things and why our politics sucks is that we have very weak parties, right?

And weak parties invite strong partisanship. And what they also do is they seduce institutions that are not supposed to be part of the partisan political process to become more partisan. And so when we had the campaign finance reforms of the 1990s, when we introduced the primary system in the 1970s, all of these things weakened parties to the point where we're basically the only advanced industrial democracy in the world where the parties don't actually get to pick their own candidates. Right.

And that makes it ripe for all sorts of demagoguery, all sorts of outsiders who are going to take on the system to come in. The parties no longer have that institutional incentive to preserve their integrity and their brand over a long time horizon. And both parties end up becoming – I think it's Ross Douthat's phrase – like fully fueled jets sitting on the tarmac waiting to be hijacked. And you get all sorts of institutions –

whatever you think about the policy issues, the NRA and Planned Parenthood are probably more effective at doing party work than the actual parties are in terms of framing issues, organizing voters. And when you have single interest groups that are invested in their single issue,

The incentive for parties to compromise, as Madison and Van Buren and all these guys envisioned, goes out the window. And you get this kind of repeated by the media where, you know, the Georgia example is going on. I'm more likely to defend the Georgia laws for the most part as not nearly being as sinister as Jeremy suggests. No, no, I didn't suggest. I said I thought the media overplayed it. Okay, that's fair. Okay, yeah.

But my point is whatever the intent was behind the Republicans doing it, the rhetoric was this is the end of democracy stuff. And that was not the case. Like it just really wasn't. Right. Just wasn't the case. Right. And I think the problem that you get is when you live in a tribal society where everyone assumes the worst motives of anybody of the other side.

Reasonable reforms sound like a Trojan horse for an attempt for total victory. And there's no issue right now that is more prone to that kind of thinking than the election stuff. And I just don't think in the foreseeable future we're going to have a reasoned, come let us reason together about voting processes moment in this country.

Jonah, I have a number that will both validate and perhaps depress you. I'm always good for one of those. We asked in January among Republican voters, we've been asking this question for a while, not just do you think of yourself as a Trump supporter or a Republican first, but also if the primary were held today, who would you vote for? Donald Trump or generic other Republican? And so we asked it in that way, and Donald Trump beats generic other Republican by a

you know, by some kind of a margin. But then we wanted to put some more meat on the bone and say, OK, well, if this other Republican and this is how we describe them as a conservative Republican candidate with a measured and responsible tone who didn't agree with Donald Trump's actions following the 2020 election or on January 6th, 2021. So your choice is that,

Republican candidate or Donald Trump. And Donald Trump wins that 59 to 30 among Republican voters. So again, not to depress slash validate you, but that is, it was the number that, that came to mind that I was scrambling to pull up. And those numbers have been consistent since for so long.

Tony Fabrizio, Trump's pollster, was asking a similar question right after January 6th. What do you think about Donald Trump versus the Republican Party, which is a question that Kristen always asks. And it's astonishing, like the extent to which he has so thoroughly remade what people consider the Republican Party to be.

in his image. Not the actual Republican Party, you know, because I realize there are a lot of Republicans who are, well, maybe not as many as there used to be, but a lot of people who consider themselves Republicans who are not Trump Republicans. But we've never seen anything like this as a force in American politics on the right in our lifetimes. So, Kristen, I have a question for you about that poll, though. How much of that is, in your best guesstimation, poll respondents knowing...

or strongly suspecting that the question that basically saying, yeah, I'd support Trump is a way of saying F you to the powers that be or the establishment, because there are a lot of,

There are a lot of these things where – and I'm not – directionally, I'm not disagreeing with the finding of the poll. I think Trump is still the nominal head, the most powerful figure in the party and all that stuff. But there are lots of times when there are these polling questions where the respondents are sophisticated enough to understand what the intent behind the question is. Sure. And they're like, screw you. I'm not going to play your game. And they say the thing that they think –

the pollster doesn't want, quote unquote, to hear. Sure, I won't disagree with you that that's certainly part of the response here. And I'd also note when we asked the question, we did another version where we described the generic other Republican as kind of the most representative

right-wingy description of Ron DeSantis, vocal supporter of Donald Trump, vocally opposed to COVID lockdowns, would have fired Fauci as president, wants to be the future of the MAGA movement. And even given that contrast, Donald Trump still beats, or back in January at least, beat this sort of fantasy land MAGA candidate too. So this was a poll where you just had a lot of Republicans who were just checking the box for Donald Trump no matter what question we asked. Donald Trump versus anything, they were picking Donald Trump.

But if you want some good news, the good news was we also did a question where we asked Republican voters about different candidate qualities and how important are each of the following things to you. And agrees with Donald Trump when he says the election was stolen.

sort of lower mid-tier on the list of things that Republican voters care about. So on the one hand, it's easy to find poll numbers that show large numbers of Republicans believing that the 2020 election wasn't fair, that voter fraud is probably more rampant than it really is. On the other hand, it's not necessarily the top driving issue. And I think this is where Donald Trump is at most risk of sort of losing his supporters and

or losing some Republicans is by being overly focused on this thing that is not the number one issue even to most Republicans these days. Let's talk about how central the belief in the election being stolen is to winning primaries as a Republican right now and is to sort of the future direction of the party. Stop the steal or whatever we want to call it.

become akin to, you know, opposing abortion rights or opposing gay marriage 30 years ago? Is it essential to sort of appealing to the base? I watched this supercut of this debate between candidates running for governor in Arizona, and they were literally just all trying to outdo each other in terms of how strident they are in the idea of the election being stolen. I'd actually like to ask everybody on this stage, what's your take?

If they would agree we had a corrupt stolen election, raise your hand. Scott, are you going to accept the results of this election if you think there's so much fraud that it can't be trusted? Are you talking about the primary I'm currently in? I'm talking about the primary. We're going to see what happens. We're going to show up and vote in droves. They're going to have to cheat even harder in order to try to win this. Your campaign's a psyop.

core is messaging that you either agree with Trump or sympathetic to January 6th or believe that the election was fishy? How important is that to appealing to the base? I think a big part of that is they're telling you you're wrong. You're

And so that kind of creates this. They meaning the elites, the press, all of that. The elites, the press, the Democratic Party are telling you that you're crazy.

And that will lead a lot of people to believe things that are just frankly not believable. I think it's more of an us versus them framing of the issue than it is necessarily about any type of factual argument.

analysis of what really happened. So in a way, the same people who wanted to vote for Trump basically to send a middle finger to, you know, the globalist elites that we're referring to, it's the kind of the same sentiment that's driving people to say, yeah, we're going to say the election was stolen because it's a middle finger to those people who are telling us we're crazy. That's what I think. And I mean, you bring up Arizona very, that's a great place to start because the actual constituency for this stuff is

pretty small but pretty potent, right? So in 2010, you guys will recall like the one of the biggest issues on the far right was birtherism. Obama had faked his birth certificate. He wasn't really born in the United States. He's Muslim. Why won't he show us the birth certificate? Well, the ground zero for that

movement was Arizona. And there were Arizona state legislators, including one by the name of Kelly Townsend, who went to Trump's office. And I reported this out for my book because I spoke to some of the people who were at this meeting. Kelly Townsend and a number of other activists went to Trump Tower, met with him about him coming out in support of this legislation that would require candidates in Arizona to prove they were born in the United States, which of course was a non-issue.

Trump loved the idea, but then eventually made that into like how that issue into how he connected with Tea Party type voters at the time. Well, Kelly Townsend, that same Republican state senator that he met with,

has now been one of the leaders of the Stop the Steal movement in Arizona. And that's not suggestive of, you know, any type of widespread support in the party for the, you know, this demonstrably false belief, but it shows you that this is the antecedent. Like there's an extremist, you know, often bigoted element to a lot of this stuff that has an antecedent in Arizona.

far-right politics that is not so distant to our past. You're saying that it's kind of a fringe, but when I look at what happened last month at the Texas State GOP convention, and I read what's in their party platform, it includes this sentence:

We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States. This isn't some random birther woman. This isn't a Facebook group. You know, this is the GOP state convention in one of the most important states for the Republican Party. So, Jonah, Kristen, talk to me, if you would, about where the Republican Party is as a party on this.

What motivates the Texas GOP convention to put that in their platform? Who's that for? It's not for me. Look, part of the problem is after four years of Trumpism, we've had sort of the long march, not to get all Gramscian, but the long march through the institutions of nutjobs. And they moved into a whole bunch of institutions and

You know, it's interesting, you know, like John Cornyn and Dan Crenshaw were pretty contemptuous of their own state party convention, saying, I don't give a rat's ass about it. I mean, I'm paraphrasing. And there was a time when, I mean, this is sort of the inverse of the thing I was talking about before about weak parties. Parties are essentially platforms for performative nonsense at this point. Every institution has become a platform, the parties included. For sure, for sure. So I don't,

Like if this had happened 25 years ago, I think this would be something to set your hair on fire about because the parties mattered more. But now it's like, OK, so they got a couple of hits on Fox News about it, you know, or, you know, OAN did a special about it. Who cares? And I think that if the parties actually had more power, more responsibility, it would actually attract people to running them.

that would not do this sort of thing, but you get into this sort of vicious cycle where you elevate jackassery and privilege jackassery, and so you get a lot of jackasses to show up. Hopefully that poison will leach out of the system over time, but I still think that, I mean, sort of on this point about giving a middle finger to the powers that be and all that, a lot of the people saying that they are diehard supporters of

of, of Donald Trump. Some absolutely are. And there's scary people and I, they yell at me all the time, but a lot of them, I just don't want to deal with the cognitive dissonance yet of admitting they were wrong. And a lot of them want to just say, screw you. I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of saying I was wrong or saying that I backed the, you know, this guy for invalid reasons. And there's also just sort of like

I mean, Kristen and I are both love me, love my dog people. And there's a similar dynamic going on with love me, love my whack job. And that there are certain figures who are just sort of cultural avatars that people will not tolerate

Being disrespected. Who are you thinking of? Well, I mean look Sarah Palin was was one of them for a time Donald Trump is obviously one now and she's about to rejoin our Country's political system like who would have thought that it looks like that's entirely possible. Yeah This is endemic to politics, too I mean the number of things that the number of times where if you criticize, you know Barack Obama when he was president on utterly valid things that you were instantly called racist for bringing up and

was really profound. And there was a left-wing attachment to Barack Obama that did not want to legitimize any form of reasonable partisan criticism. We saw it with Hillary Clinton. I mean, the idea that somehow it was sexist to be opposed to Hillary Clinton was incredibly empowering to the right because it was, first of all, it was so stupid that

But second of all, it empowered people to sort of say screw you to the establishment because they felt like they were being manipulated. And there's just this elite notion out there that you can manipulate people by constraining the words they're allowed to use and what they're allowed to think about certain figures. And if we could loosen our grip on a lot of that stuff, I personally think that Donald Trump –

Is going to fade, but it's going to fade the way like Bill Clinton faded for the left. It was like everybody was really, really loyal to him and broke no criticism of him. And then like five or 10 years later, you're like, what the hell was all that about? And I think something similar will happen over time with Donald Trump. But right now, the more the left says he's Hitler, the more a lot of people on the right are going to be saying, I'm not letting go of my love for this guy because I'm not going to give you jerks the satisfaction.

Kristen, how seriously should we take crazy? Like, you know, Jeremy is saying that the crazy here is fringe and can be smaller than it seems. Jonah is saying that, you know, the fringe has grabbed the mic in institutions like the GOP. And a little bit this conversation has echoes to me of the conversations that were happening in 2016, where people kept saying,

Oh, yeah. You know, Trump has a lead, but so did Herman Cain. You know, let's enjoy watching him sound off on Morning Joe. It's still early. It's a crowded field. This is a joke. He'll fade away. Don't take it seriously.

And then before we knew it, Trump was elected president and all of those people who ha ha ha laughed alongside it had egg on their face. And I wonder if it's a similar story here. You know, is this something that is going to fade away or is this the story of a growing number of people who simply will not accept the results of democratic elections and

Which do you think it is? Well, so there are a couple of ways this could be like 2016. There's the way that you just laid out, which is that there is a larger appetite for this than is currently being met or satisfied by the political establishment. But there's a way you can look at this through that lens of 2016 and actually see something like the opposite.

So if these institutions have been captured by those who are very MAGA and very aligned with what Donald Trump says, and if you are the Texas GOP and at your convention, the big thing you are focused on there is we're going to talk about the 2020 election and voter fraud in the same way that in 2016, Republican elites got caught flat footed because what their voters wanted was out of step with what party leaders wanted.

It's possible that we are also seeing that again, except in this case, it is the voters who are the ones saying, I'm mad that my gas is $5 a gallon. I am mad that the border doesn't seem secure. Why are you so focused on this issue? So back in February, we asked a question where instead of asking people, what's your top issue? Because everybody these days says inflation and the economy, and that's very important and interesting, but doesn't tell you what's going on under the surface.

We said, well, how concerned are you, if at all, that each of the following are a problem for the country? And we gave 20 different things, at least, for people to rate in this survey. And so for Republicans, top of the list were illegal immigration, crime, taxes, media bias, socialism, China. You have to go –

pretty much to the middle to the lower part of the list to find concern about voter fraud. And that to me just again sort of suggests it's possible that for many of these Republican sort of leaders or very prominent loud voices that they believe this is the number one issue and they are echoing what Donald Trump is, what is clearly the number one issue to him because it's personal. But

But that's not necessarily in step with where rank and file Republicans are. So it could be like 2016, but in a different way, in that party elites and leaders are out of step with the things that voters are the most concerned about, but in a way you might not expect. So if ordinary voters are concerned about things like gas prices and milk prices and inflation and crime and all of the things you mentioned, I wonder how much power, though, this movement has already

over party elites or the elected leaders of the party. One of the things that I noticed is Mike Pence, one of the most conservative members of the Republican Party, as soon as he decided to do his job, his duty, and certify the results of the election, his approval rating dropped sharply. Is that a signal example, Jeremy? Absolutely. To other leaders in the party? Another example, I look at

To go back to the Texas GOP convention, an amazing moment in which Dan Crenshaw, a war hero, lost his eye in Afghanistan. Look at eye patch McCain right here. You're a rhino, you fool. Is confronted by, you know, members of the base screaming at him that he's eye patch McCain. Yep. And he's a rhino. And, you know, like, how much are those examples worth?

Pence's approval rating dropping, Crenshaw getting confronted by people who claim he's not a real conservative. You know, what are the sort of follow on effects on other elected leaders in the party when they're watching this? And they've been watching it with Trump since 2015 when he called John McCain a fake war hero in front of an evangelical audience in Iowa and the audience laughed.

I mean, that's not to say that all evangelical Christians believe that kind of stuff or are that cruel, but there is a constituency for that on the right. I think that you're just not going to be able to take Trump out of the Republican Party as long as he wants that and elected officials feel like he is the center of gravity. I just can't help but feeling as I cover some of these folks who are

lower-ranking elected officials that they're faking it. Like, they don't go along with everything that Trump believes. They don't like him. But they fear their voters so much that they are going along with it because they think that's what their voters want. Now, to your point...

If indeed voters feel like Trump is too focused on himself and relitigating and whining about the results of the 2020 election when in fact their concerns are much more personal and much greater, maybe –

That changes the equation. I don't know. But Jeremy, speaking of faking it, what percentage of Republicans in the Senate and in the House right now do you think are faking it on this question? Oh, I think I think a majority. I mean, I couldn't put a hard number on a question. What percentage aren't? That is a better question. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Do you think most of them are kind of secretly closeted with Liz Cheney but can't say so because they fear their voters?

With Liz Cheney, not necessarily because, again, she has become, quote unquote, one of them. That's how they are allowed to, Trump supporters are allowed to dismiss the very damning revelations that

that have come from these hearings. So I want to kind of blow your mind with this because one of the things that surprised me the most in that focus group I mentioned earlier about January 6th was one of the things- The eight people, the only one. The eight people where only one said, I think Joe Biden won legitimately. So we were talking through various aspects of January 6th and one of them was-

to read to these respondents some of the text messages from, say, someone like Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, the texts that they were sending on January 6th saying, hey, you need to call this off. The texts they were sending to Trump and people in the White House.

Correct. To Trump, to Meadows, to folks in the White House. And mentioned that, you know, in the days immediately following January 6th, there were a lot of Republicans, some who resigned from the cabinet, etc. You know, you had Kevin McCarthy say Trump bears responsibility. What do you think about that? And the respondents all viewed the disavowal of Trump as

as the disingenuous thing. That in their view, these people sort of kissing up to Trump is not the disingenuous thing. That it's when they go out and they criticize Trump that that's when they're putting on a face to try to win over the establishment or what have you. So we put this in a survey. We asked, okay, when Republican politicians criticize Donald Trump, do you think it's because they genuinely disagree with him or that they're just trying to please the establishment?

And only about a third think that when a Republican politician is criticizing Trump, they're doing so because it's coming from a genuine, I just disagree with this guy kind of place. So many Republican voters actually view the fakery as going the other direction.

Okay, I'm just going to say the question about Liz Cheney, I think Jeremy's entirely right. She's become radioactive because she's not a team player anymore. I think the more interesting question, not to criticize, but is how many of them are like Mitch McConnell? Mitch McConnell has had his say. He said he prefers somebody else to the nominee. Let's look to the future, yada, yada, yada. He had his floor statement at the impeachment. And then he's just like, let's get Republicans elected.

And that is, like, I've been calling Republicans on the Hill for five years now. The place is overrun with closet normals who, when you talk to them away from a camera, will say, oh, God, this guy makes our life more difficult. If he could only be disciplined, if he could stop tweeting like an escaped monkey from a cocaine study, my life would be so much better. But the cameras turn on, and they must talk about how, under Comrade Trump, we've had the greatest weed harvests in the urals we've ever seen. And...

So the fakery is all on the performative side of supporting Trump. But there are very few people who, I mean, I would bet you even Jim Jordan, he's in private, I'm sure probably pretty pro-Trump, but what he likes about Trump is the performative stick it to the liberal stuff. He probably gets frustrated too with the actual things that Trump has done, made his life more difficult. The best historical analogy is to go back to the McCarthy period.

Donald Trump is very McCarthyite and not just coincidentally or by analogy. He was a longtime student of Roy Cohn and of Roger Stone, and those guys have deep history and all that crap.

And, you know, one of my heroes, Irving Kristol, you know, wrote this famous essay and commentary in 1952, quasi half-heartedly giving a little defense to McCarthy, just simply saying that he wasn't a McCarthyite, but he was like, look, there's one thing that the American people know about Joseph McCarthy. He's an anti-communist. About his detractors, they know no such thing. And there is this dynamic that says, if you criticize Trump, that is a signal. It's a shibboleth.

It is this tell that says you are lending aid and comfort to the other tribe. And so you're not allowed to say it publicly. But what Republicans and even conservatives, pro-Trump conservatives, say behind closed doors about Trump, I mean, I'm sure the list of things that Steve Bannon has said about Donald Trump is amazing. Including that he would go down in history as the worst president in between Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan. Yeah.

Yeah, which is a little unkind of Buchanan. We could have an entire conversation about closeted normalcy, which is really the entire dynamic of our time because the exact same thing exists among liberals who quietly will tell you, why is the Democratic Party dying on the hill of calling people, you know, uterus havers and birthing people, but are too terrified of their left flank? Okay, let's talk about the January 6th committee.

Harvard-Harris poll just came out a few weeks ago, and according to their numbers, 53% of voters say that the hearings are biased. 63% say that Congress should be focusing on other things. I imagine things like inflation. And two-thirds say that the hearings are dividing the country. So let me ask each of you briefly, are the January 6th committee's public hearings helping bring people closer to reality or

or actually just polarizing us further or status quo. So Kristen had a question about this in one of her polls recently.

And I, you know, I was surprised actually to see a, the number of people who on both sides, overall voter registered voters who said they were paying attention and the number of registered voters on both sides of the aisle who said that they had learned something new about the attacks. So I don't know what that means, but it suggests to me that

that the hearings are penetrating in a way that maybe some of the cynical analysis in the beginning got wrong.

To put the numbers behind exactly what Jeremy just mentioned, I mean, we found 52% of Republicans in that survey question said they had watched either a lot or a little of the hearings. Some things are always overinflated, but the fact that 52% of Republicans said that they have watched either a lot or a little was significant. Most, 67%, said that it had not changed their view or told them anything new, but 28% said

said that they had learned something new. That's among Republicans. So is this changing the entire GOP's view of January 6th? No, but...

But there may be some folks out there who are surprised by some of these revelations. Another revelation from one of the recent hearings, Brad Parscale, the major tech consultant for the Trump campaign, on January 6th texting with Katrina Pearson, another Trump advisor, that I feel bad for having worked for this guy. I can't believe we did this.

And then, you know, it sort of coming out that actually these people, maybe the fraudulence runs the other direction. Maybe these people are lying to you when they say they do support Trump. That to me is potentially an interesting piece of fallout from all of this. Jonah, helping, hurting? Yeah, so I think, look...

The January 6th, you asked, you know, people say that the thing is biased, according to the polls. It is biased. I mean, just as an objective thing. I'm very much in favor of the January 6th committee. I would have rather they did it the way they originally proposed it, but they didn't. It is one-sided. There's no Trump defenders on the committee. There's no cross-examination in an adversarial way. And again, I wish it were otherwise, but, you know, Jimmy Crack Corn and I don't care at this point because I'd rather it exist than not. And I think the...

Look, how to put this. One of my favorite scenes from The Sopranos was when Chris Moltisanti, they had an intervention for him. What's going on? Have a seat. Right, because he was back on the junk. Christopher, we're here to talk about your drug problem. What? And he starts saying, who are you guys to give me this grief? You got some balls, you know that? All of you.

You want to talk about self-control? How about you, Syl? F***ing every s*** you got working in the place when you got a wife and kids at home? Guys, guys, whoa, whoa. You know, I got high with you and, you know, look, and you, this is not a skirt you won't chase and blah, blah, blah, blah, and they beat the crap out of him. We are here to talk about you killing yourself with drugs, not my f***ing personality. That's right. I'm going to kill myself?

Well, you f***ing are going to have a heart attack by the time you're 50. No! No! Sit down. Interventions are by their nature polarizing and divisive. And they're also biased, right? It's like, we're not talking about our faults here. We're talking about your faults. And that's sort of what the January 6th committee is, is it's an intervention.

And it's ugly and it's unpleasant. And the people who are being criticized by extending the metaphor too much and having their faults pointed out without having the other side's faults being pointed out, it drives them crazy and it's polarizing. But interventions are also very good in the long run. And I think that's getting a historical record. I think the criminal referral stuff is garbage. But getting the record out there, exposing this stuff –

is necessarily polarizing and divisive, but in the long run, it's a good thing. One of the things that was just echoing in my mind is this audio clip that Adam Kinzinger released, some of the voicemails that he's been getting since agreeing to be on the January 6th committee. You're a horrible, horrible, garbage fucking person. We're going to get you. Coming to your house, son.

Gonna get you and Liz Cheney. They were really brutal and quite frightening. You're gonna swing for fucking treason, you communist fuck. Gonna come protest in front of your house this weekend. You know who your family is and we're gonna get you. And this is how a lot of Republicans are being treated by people in this more extreme wing of the party, including people protesting outside of their homes

Jeremy, is this our new normal? It kind of feels like that for now. I mean, the country is not in a good place. And people across the political spectrum say that to me all the time. And it stems from a crisis of leadership at the top in both parties. Both parties are being led by geriatrics.

without a, you know, I mean, you could maybe argue more of a bench on the Republican side, but not clear, you know, without any succession plan, without having fostered a generation of

of new leaders who are allowed to think differently, who are allowed to say things that are unpopular on Twitter. And I mean, if you survey, as I know Kristen has, like people about what they feel they can and can't say, that is especially problematic.

because like this is a democracy after all. Like we're supposed to be able to thrive on a free exchange of ideas. And we've been talking about all these Republicans who secretly loathe Donald Trump and think he's an albatross. It applies to them too, not just the left. Like they can't say that. And if we're in that kind of place as a country, that's kind of scary.

One of the leaders of the far-right group the Oath Keepers testified in front of the January 6th committee. What it was going to be was an armed revolution. He said members of his group were ready and that they remain ready for a civil war and a, quote, armed revolution. There was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol.

This could have been the spark that started a new civil war. And we got very lucky that the loss of life was, and as tragic as it is, that we saw on January 6th, the potential was so much more. There's a lot of people, you know, including some people on the sort of center right, that are warning of physical violence, right? That the kind of

cold civil war that it sometimes it feels like we're in could actually get hot. And that January 6th or the violent rioting that we saw in the summer of 2020 in places like Seattle and Portland and Kenosha, that that is becoming more normalized, that that's a sampling of what could be coming.

Jonah, Kristen, I would love for you to weigh in on that. Are the warnings of a kind of coming civil war real or are they LARPing and hyperbole? Well, I don't think an armed civil war is likely. I do think that this goes back to

This goes back to my earlier comments about people feeling powerless and feeling like institutions don't listen to them, feeling like their side is losing power while the other side is gaining power, that if you believe that change is not possible through traditional means...

you will seek non-traditional means to make those changes. Now, that does not have to mean violent revolution. Some of this you're seeing in workplaces across the country for younger workers who say they want change if they feel like the traditional ways of pushing for change aren't

working, then they're going to go demand that the CEO of their company take a stance on an issue that has nothing to do with that company's portfolio. Because, hey, if I can't get politicians to listen to me, maybe I can at least bully the CEO of my company into making a statement about this. That if people feel that the traditional ways of bringing about change do not feel empowered, they will seek other avenues for doing so. That does not mean it has to be armed revolution.

But I would not completely dismiss the fact that with this increased anger becomes a greater and greater sense of, well, the other side will do anything possible to hold on to power, so... Why won't we? The guardrails are off. Why wouldn't we? Jonah? Yeah, I largely agree with that. I think that the likelihood of more political violence is very high. The likelihood of a civil war is extremely low. And part of the problem is...

People look at the other side and say they get to do that. Why can't I do this? And I cannot tell you how many people I've heard from, how many conversations I've had from people who are saying, you know, you're condemning the violence on January 6th. Where were you when they were rioting during the pandemic, during the Black Lives Matter stuff, right? And

The way that was covered, you know, the mostly peaceful thing with the guy standing in front of burning buildings, gave a lot of people the permission structure to say, well, they're condoning violence. We can condone violence. I think that's how the whole world goes blind. It's an incredibly stupid and cynical thing. But this point that Kirsten's making about how

When traditional politics doesn't do its job, untraditional means become legitimized is very real because the corollary to my point about the parties is it's also my point about Congress. Congress is where politics is supposed to happen. It's supposed to be the place where different interests fight it out to craft policies for the whole country.

And Congress does not do its job anymore. It does not legislate the way it's supposed to. And when politics doesn't happen in this sphere, which is designed to deal with politics, when it doesn't do its job,

Like water seeking its level, the desire for change spills out into other places and so everything else becomes politicized. The parties and the Congress are supposed to be like these containment centers for politics so that the rest of our lives don't get irradiated with politics. But because no one wants to stay in their freaking lanes anymore.

And every corporation has to have a statement about Black Lives Matter and climate change and everything going down the list. And because every university has to basically teach woke government activism and whatnot, we now think that every sphere of our lives is political. I mean it used to be sort of a dumb cliche, the personal is political. But now everything is becoming politicized. And I think that that tendency –

is going to be around for a while, but it's worth just putting things in perspective. I mean, the amount of violence in this country in the 60s and early 70s dwarfs

we see today. But it's completely, it's amazing. It's not talked about. This Brian Burroughs book I'm reading, Days of Rage, it's like there was a domestic terrorist attack like every other day in the 70s and I never learned about that growing up and I don't know why that was sort of memory hold. It's strange. You're right. I've read Days of Rage recently myself and sitting around at my apartment right now around the corner is the house that the weatherman blew up. I was like, do you live in that house or do you live next to that house? Yeah.

It's right down the block, yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about the Democrats' role in all of this. You know, I gave a talk last week, and this happens every single time. I mentioned something about election denial, stop this deal on the right. And invariably, you know, someone who identifies as a conservative or a Republican or even a libertarian comes up to me and says, what about the Democrats' own election denial? Yeah.

Or what about, you know, as my wife calls it, blue anon? And he goes on to say, you've got Stacey Abrams in Georgia who never conceded her loss to Brian Kemp. And several prominent Democrats, including the White House press secretary, have never disavowed that idea that Kemp stole the election or, you know, not to pick on her too much. So the press secretary also says that the 2016 election was stolen from Hillary Clinton.

And then you have this resurgence in claims in the wake of Dobbs and other, you know, Supreme Court decisions that are unpalatable to the left that the Supreme Court is somehow fundamentally illegitimate. And that's not just coming from the fringes. And the pattern is really the same that we see on the right, which is we don't like the outcome. And so we undermine and question the authority of the institution itself.

What do you guys say to that response from people on the right who say, yeah, who will even say, yeah, it's bad what the right's doing. It's bad what Trump's doing. But why do we never talk about the same patterns that are happening among liberals, the progressives and the Democrats? Well, it's a denial of reality problem that the left has that they don't

And it's incredibly warping. And from the perspective of an institution like the Democratic Party that exists to win elections, it's incredibly hurtful.

Because just today, perfect example, the inflation report comes out and the Biden White House's response is, well, it's not that bad. 9.2% inflation. 9.2%, the highest I believe since 1981, highest rate of increase. And the response from the White House is, no, it's not really that bad.

That may be literally true that the sure gas prices have leveled off in the last few weeks and in July inflation, but that's their academic argument. That's not very soothing to the person who is still spending $100 to fill up their gas tank. So and I'm hardly the first to recognize this, but there are certain issues that the right harps on and often disingenuously and hyperbolically, right?

But that overreaction on the right gives the left license to say that's not a real issue. And that is that's a real problem. Yeah. It's the Fox News effect. Yeah. If Fox treats a story as a big story, a lot of mainstream media outlets will say, well, that's a Fox story. We don't touch it. Look, the crisis at the border is a real story.

And just because I may think that Fox overplays it or exaggerates it from time to time, but it's a real story and it's a legitimate... Or crime. Or crime. It's a legitimate public policy issue. And there is this sort of seesaw effect that if one side makes a big deal of it, the other side feels it shouldn't. But to get back to the initial question, I agree with all of your conservative audience members who say, what about the Democrats? My problem these days is that

We live in an era where we don't believe in our norms. We weaponize them. And so we are constantly saying, look how they're violating these rules. They say we violate the rules. Look, they're violating the rules. Mike Pence was always my favorite example of this during the Trump years where Nancy Pelosi would say something irresponsible. Believe it or not, that does happen. And Mike Pence would say,

I am so saddened and disappointed that she would do something like that. Or I'm so saddened and disappointed that we can't all adhere to these high principles of democracy and good government and yada, yada, yada. And then the follow-up question was, and Donald Trump said this crazy thing. And he says, well, look, Donald Trump was elected to be a disruptor. And the problem is that you cannot be a credible critic of the other side's norm violations

if you don't actually adhere to the same norms yourself. And instead what we do is we use these norms to prove the other side's hypocrisy and beat them up with it while exempting our side from following these norms that we say that are important because they're just weapons now, they're not standards.

The Democrats have adopted this really cynical strategy of financially supporting candidates that are the most extreme, that believe in Stop the Steal and are loud about it because they think those candidates will be easier to beat. What do you guys think of that as a strategy?

both politically and I guess morally would be the other question. I think it's a terrible strategy in a political environment where even if you didn't have nine plus percent inflation, even if you didn't have a president with job approval in the 30-ish percent range, just based purely on the fact that Republicans are the party out of power and it's the midterm and they're probably going to have a good year,

gambling on the idea that you can try to hang on to some power as Democrats by trying to push as many, you know, whatever the 2022 version of Christine O'Donnell is into as many races as possible. That is a dangerous game for Democrats to be playing in this political environment. And I think they are going to come to regret it in some of these instances. Jonah, what do you think? Yeah, I agree with Kristen entirely about the

bad strategery involved. I also think it's fundamentally evil and really dangerous on a much deeper level insofar as

Look, it's one thing to go promote Christine O'Donnell, right? And for listeners who don't remember, she was the one who said, I'm not a witch, I'm you, and she was a bad candidate. And Democrats like to run against bad candidates. Claire McCaskill did that in her races. It's cynical, hardball politics, and I don't like it, but it is a fact of life. My father-in-law gave money to Al Sharpton when he ran for president because he liked the idea of screwing with the Democrats, right? But it's a very different thing when you're going around saying that these people...

are a fundamental threat to democracy, that they are fascists, that they are authoritarians, that democracy itself is on the ballot, and then you give them money. Congressman Valadao in California was one of the 10 guys to vote for impeachment of Donald Trump. And during the post-impeachment stuff,

Every Democrat, oh, if only there were more Republicans like that, Republicans with conscience, Republicans who care about their country and vote their principles and yada, yada, yada, and lavished media attention on them. And then come his primary, Democrats spent piles of money running ads attacking him for voting for impeachment.

It's so profoundly grotesque and cynical to do if you – because either the people saying that they are fighting for the very survival of democracy, if they believe it, what they're doing is evil.

And if they don't believe it, saying that this is all about the fight of democracy is evil. Why fund the people? It's very similar in logic to the Weimar communists in Germany who supported and voted with the Nazis under the rubric of first brown, then red, because they thought Hitler was a clown and...

will benefit from the politics that come from this. If you actually believe this stuff, and I don't think democracy's nearly as in peril as the people who are saying this every morning on Morning Joe, but if you believe it, don't fund democracy.

The fascists. I think it's grotesque. It also doesn't work. I mean, if you look at what happened in Colorado recently, those candidates by and large did not win. So it's any time I think Democrats try to parrot Republicans, act like Republicans, they do a really bad job at it. So it's it just doesn't seem very, very wise to me. And it's sort of how you got Trump in the first place.

It's a bunch of, you know, like Obama picked a fight with him at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Everyone said he was a joke, blah, blah, blah. Lots of pointy-headed liberal pundits were talking about how it would be great if he was the nominee because then Hillary would win. And the story turned out differently. We'll be back with more debate and ideas about how the country might come together. Stay with us.

I think anyone that loves America, anyone that wants us to be a liberal democracy should be thinking a lot right now about what we can do to make a difference. So let's start with that question sort of in a personal realm.

There are people that I love in my life who are not full on Steve Bannon, Sidney Powell, stop the steal people, but who definitely think something fishy happened and are definitely the people who feel enraged at an elite that they feel has lied to them.

what kind of conversation should we be having with people in our lives who are kind of tipping toward a position, and maybe it's on the left, maybe it's on the right, where they don't believe the outcomes of elections? Jonah, what's the best argument to have with those people? What's the most persuasive thing that we could be saying? So part of the problem is it's a difficult conversation to have because there's this enormous amount of goalposts shifting.

Where, you know, in the heady days after the election, it was Dominion and Smart Tech and Hugo Chavez and all that and the Pentaverate and the Ag Council and whatever. You're bringing me back. I didn't even remember half of those things. Now I do. Yes. And so then I think part of the way to do it is to say, hey, look.

completely understand your suspicion, right? I get it. But pick an argument and stick to it and we'll argue about that. The problem I have arguing with a lot of these people is it's pushing down on the bump in the balloon or in the carpet or whatever where you can beat back one argument and then they start with the conclusion and then they retrofit facts to fit it. And

All you can really do is point out that that's what's going on psychologically and that this is not really an argument about facts anymore. This is an argument about how you want to justify a preexisting conclusion. So I think patience is important, but my basic view at this point is to sort of stop talking about the election stuff and start saying, look, this is just not a healthy way to live your life. The important things in life are much closer to home. If you've invested...

this much of who you are and what you believe in into what a bunch of people in Washington are talking about or saying, then you need to recalibrate your priorities. Because this stuff, it's my livelihood, but it's not going to fill the hole in your soul. It's not going to give you meaning. And there are no permanent victories. And you should start looking towards the things in your life that have a greater return on the investment of your passions. But the people who say, Kristen, you know,

Why should I trust these people? Why should I trust these institutions? Fauci lied to me. The CDC lied to me. You know, the New York Times lies to me. Lies, lies, lies all around. So if lies are happening constantly from these institutions that we used to think were so trustworthy and Teflon strong, why would the electoral process be exempt from that? I think that is kind of the heart of what their claim is. And how do you address that?

So I think this is rooted in the, there's been this nationalization of so many conversations and we focus on national institutions where there's actually still a lot of trust in things that are closer to home. So let's take, for instance, when you asked voters both before and after the 2020 election, do you believe that votes nationally were counted accurately?

There's a huge drop off among Trump supporters between like October and November on that question that after the election, they go from thinking, sure, I think votes will be counted accurately to going, no, not at all. But when you ask, do you believe that elections this November in your community were run and administered correctly?

very well, somewhat well, et cetera, the drop-off is minuscule. You still wind up with 81% of Trump voters who say that elections in their community in November of 2020 were run at least somewhat well. And when you ask people, do you believe that your vote was accurately counted?

Republican or Democratic, no matter what age, race, education, there's almost no gaps on that question. 85% of voters say that they believe their own vote was counted accurately. So I think...

Sometimes these conversations can become, you know, that distrust foments when we're talking about things that are shadowy and far away and are institutions that it's very easy to demonize and see why they would be distrustful. But when you're talking about the little old lady who's the clerk of elections in your community, it's a lot harder to distrust her or think that there's something shady going on behind the scenes with her motives. And then you see that showing up in the data. So it may just be a matter of how can we have more conversations about

And frankly, focusing on this at a local level is going to be important because that's where a lot of the Stop the Steal folks are now trying to get more engaged. Hey, we want to be the poll watchers in our communities, et cetera. My hope is that that experience would convert them away from their views that elections are all corrupt. But I do think that the local level is where this battle is most likely to be productively fought. Jeremy, what do you see as the role of the press here?

in sort of reestablishing trust and bringing people back from the brink of unreality? That's a great question, Barry, because I think one of the things that the media has lost is its ability to disconfirm

its willingness, rather, to disconfirm information that its audience doesn't want to hear. And this is the business that we are supposed to be in. We are supposed to be objective and truth-telling, and we show no favor to either side, and we publish facts without fear. I think certain facts have become politically unpalatable. I think certain facts make people uncomfortable, and

Until we reestablish that as our role to print stories without fear of what a Twitter mob that is unrepresentative of an average reader or certainly an average American, until we can do that, I don't think that we're going to be able to rebuild trust. And the comforting thing is, and I'll end this on like an optimistic note, is I know

that there are a lot of conversations that are happening, certainly where I work, about that very issue and a recognition that it's important not to be seen as beholden to one particular party or ideology. Jeremy Peters, Jonah Goldberg, Kristen Soltis Anderson, thank you guys so much. Thank you. Thank you for having us. My thanks to Kristen, Jeremy, and Jonah for joining me today. Please go read their books and support their work.

And as always, my thanks to you for listening. Share this conversation with people in your community. But most importantly, have an honest conversation of your own, especially with the people you disagree with. If you want to support our work, head over to commonsense.news and become a subscriber today. See you next time.