Liz Cheney Endorsing Kamala Harris is a “B.F.D.” with Charlie Sykes
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Hey everyone, it's me, Reed Galen. As you may have noticed, I don't host the Lincoln Project podcast anymore, but I'm so excited to share with you my brand new show, The Homefront.

On the home front, you'll get the same incisive discourse about the pro-democracy movement from the smartest, most driven people in the fight today. If you're listening to this episode on the Lincoln Project podcast channel, I invite you to subscribe to the home front on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows. I want to say thank you to all of you in the pro-democracy movement, and I look forward to continuing our American journey together. And now, the home front.

Welcome to the home front. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm joined by Charlie Sykes, publisher of the Substack newsletter To the Contrary, columnist for MSNBC, contributor to The Atlantic, and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, available wherever fine books are sold. Today, he's coming to us from Mequon, Wisconsin, just north of Milwaukee. Charlie, welcome. Welcome.

Hey, it's good to be with you, Reid. Well, Charlie, thanks so much for being the first guest on the new show. So a lot to go through here. We got 60 days to Election Day as we're recording. And your latest post on To the Contrary actually lined up with a lot of the things I wanted to talk about. So first, let's talk about Liz Cheney.

So during the course of this week down in North Carolina, Liz Cheney was speaking to a crowd doing basically a question and answer session in which she said, I am a conservative. I've always been a conservative.

And despite that, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris. And as you noted, and look, I worked for the Cheney family for many years. My dad worked with former Vice President Cheney when he was still in the U.S. House many moons ago.

So there's no question about her bona fides on the right. So give us a sense of how you see that. And then I want to talk a little bit about what it means for someone like Liz or for like you or for me to make a decision like that.

No, I mean, obviously, look, as I as I wrote, you know, this is this is a BFD, but I'm not sure that the people fully appreciate the magnitude of what she has done. And as you point out, look, Liz Cheney is is not a squish. She is not a rhino. She has not remade herself into a a, you know, woke Liz 2.0 progressive. She is still a conservative speaking as a conservative.

And so for her to not just repudiate Donald Trump, but to endorse Kamala Harris is a major step. And I want to get to that. I mean, keep in mind that she is going where a lot of other anti-Trump Republicans have refused to go. Chris Christie, Mike Pence, Pat Toomey, others have said they're not voting for Donald Trump, but they cannot bring themselves to cross over and vote for Kamala Harris.

And there's a reason for that. I mean, first of all, there's a lot of cowardice. But also, people need to understand that when you cross that line, you cannot recross it. That when you endorse a Democratic candidate for president, you basically have left your tribe pretty much forever. And I think people need to understand that.

what Liz Cheney is walking away from. She's saying goodbye to all of that, not just her career, her professional associations and her career, but all of decades of what she has done in public life, the community, the world, more than just a tribe, to walk away from that has a huge personal price to it.

And I know we've talked about this before, Reid, but those people who have walked away from Donald Trump have paid a really considerable personal cost in terms of friendships, in terms of associations. And Liz Cheney has given up a lot, not just her seat in Congress, not just her leadership position, but I'm guessing that the entire political universe and social universe that she used to live in is now gone for her.

And I think it's very important the way that she is framing it, that as a conservative, she's doing something that would have been unthinkable because this year it's not about left versus right, liberal versus conservative. It's not about whether or not you agree with somebody on all the policies. It is about whether or not you are willing to take a stand for the Constitution. And it is it's such a powerful message that she has. And I hope that it cuts through.

Well, and I want to I want to stick with one thing you talked about. And I think that you and I have both been through this in our own ways. And I think all of these journeys are individual is the idea that, you know, you mentioned Liz Cheney, you mentioned Kinzinger, Jeff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia. Right. Like there's they as you said, like they have crossed the Rubicon. There's no going back.

Right. But they do have an opportunity, I think, to say there are, as you said, principled conservatives out there who do look at these things as, you know, there is a right way to do things. There is a wrong way to do things. Character matters. And also the idea here that, you know, conservatism as it is today or as it has been redefined, I guess, by Donald Trump is is pretty ugly.

It's it's it's very nasty. It's revanchist. It's not positive. Right. I mean, I think even as Republicans. Right. You know, you want to be a happy warrior, a la Reagan. You want to be able to be a little bit iconoclastic like a John McCain. But the thing was, is that to to to stay on the wrong side of the river. And I am going to call it that, Charlie, you have to compromise everything.

And I think that's the one thing that's always surprised me is how many of these people you just mentioned to me, all of these guys, like, do they think they have a future in this Republican Party, too? Because it's not like the MAGA base wants these guys either.

Now, that's an interesting question, because I mean, take Pat Toomey, who is a pretty solid conservative. Does he actually imagine that post Trump that there's going to be a party that is going to welcome him, that is going to return to some sort of a principal basis? And that's the naivete. And we've seen this over the last decade.

10 years, how they've rationalized their support for Trump. Well, okay, no, it's just the mean tweets or it's just this, but as long as in our Faustian bargain, as long as we get tax cuts or we get regulatory reform or we get justices on the Supreme Court,

But the problem is, is that as you point out, Trump has rejected one principle after another. But let's even leaving aside the, you know, let's just leave aside the, you know, the ideological aspect of this. You know, this is a man who has called for terminating the Constitution, who tried to overthrow the election. And the Republican base has come to accept that. Does anyone think that

The Republican base that is willing to accept Donald Trump and his lies and his sedition and his felonies, they're going to turn around and suddenly go, yeah, let's go back to some sort of Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Ronald Reagan style party. It's just not going to happen. But it's very, very hard for people to break those ties and to break those allegiances and the habits of a lifetime.

Well, and I think you've even seen it right. Let's let's go back to Georgia for a second. So in 2020, at the end of 2020 post-election, Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, Raffensperger directly refused to do anything on behalf of Donald Trump in his quixotic and felonious or would be felonious attempts to overturn the election there.

Now you see a situation in which just a few weeks ago, Trump is on the stump attacking Kemp, attacking Kemp's wife. You know, just a few days after that, he's on Twitter or threads or truth or whatever it is, basically kissing Kemp's rear. Right. Which is a very rare thing. I assume they saw some polling there.

And now you've got Kemp, you know, standing behind this sort of Georgia elections certification board, whatever you're going to call it. And again, it seems to me, Charlie, that this is about the height of cynicism, which is I assume Kemp is desperately hoping that Trump loses. But to your point that he can have some purchase with that MAGA base in 2025 and beyond, because he can say, well, when the time came, I stood with him.

Yeah, you know, and again, we've seen this pattern before where people think that they can throw scraps of meat to the baby alligator, you know, figuring that, okay, you know, it's just a baby alligator. How bad can it be? You know, I mean, I'll get through today. And then they are shocked to find out later when the alligator gets, you know, large and

crawls out of the bathtub and begins eating people, including them. You know, this is the mistake that they've made that you can somehow appease this. But here's another example of how, of the interaction between the Republican Party and Donald Trump. Donald Trump has not fundamentally changed in the last decade. Donald Trump is who he has always been.

What has been remarkable has been the way in which the Republican Party has changed and morphed itself

In order to accommodate Donald Trump. There were a lot of people back in 2015 and 2016 who thought that the presidency would somehow change Donald Trump or the Republican Party would find some way to domesticate Donald Trump. It's been the other way around. That they, in fact, have accommodated him over and over and over again. And, you know, has led them to this moment.

So let's let's talk about this. I was I was doing an interview with a friend of probably ours, you know, sort of political slash media type. And what I've heard from a bunch of our Democratic friends, Charlie, is that when and if Trump loses in November, that the spell of MAGA will be broken. He will go away. And suddenly, magically, the Republican Party will return to power.

The salad days of George W. Bush, right? Like the idea that normalcy will retake. Well, won't the establishment reassert itself? And I'm always like, guys, you know, I've likened this, Charlie, to sort of like a car wreck, right? Like even when you've beaten the guy, you're still in the hospital. You're still really beat up. And there's a long way to go. And...

you know, as you've probably seen in some parts of your home state of Wisconsin, like MAGA has seeped in, right? This is not like, you know, oh, yeah, suddenly to your point, we're going to have a young idealistic Paul Ryan from Janesville, Wisconsin, popping up going, I'm going to be Mr. Smith going back to Washington. So give us a sense. Why have you think is it is it wishful thinking? And then give us a sense of what you think a 2025 looks like in the Republican Party.

No, I do think that is wishful thinking and wishful thinking to the point of being absolutely delusional because, you know, what Donald Trump is doing is, I mean, the Republican base likes what Donald Trump is doing. They look at him and they go, yes, we want more of that.

You know, I was just this morning, I was working on a piece about, you know, a lot of the things that are happening right now and had gone back to look at the book that I wrote back in 2017, How the Right Lost Its Mind, The Rise of the Alt-Right, the Alternative Reality Media.

Right. And you look at that, then the pattern is there, except that it is accelerated and amplified beyond anything that even I imagined at the time. You know, if Donald Trump is defeated, by the way, he will never admit that he's defeated. Sure. People need to brace themselves. This will not be over on November 5th. This will not be close to being over on November 5th. There is no chance that Donald Trump will ever acknowledge that he is defeated. So keep that in mind. You know, the big lie, too.

Is is is is coming, but also work in progress, I'd even say exactly. So there is this vast infrastructure out there that feeds upon paranoia and division and the kind of Trumpian themes. And that's not going away.

There's an infrastructure that exists. There is a corruption of the Republican mind that is not going to change. These people are in place. The incentives are still the same. The incentive structure is to tell the MAGA base what it wants to hear, to keep them in a state of excitement and anger, feeling that they are being betrayed. And so the perpetual outrage machine has...

grown, I would say exponentially just in the last five years. So that's not going away. So in terms of like Republican Party reverting back to normal, I'm sorry to do this, you know, on your on your first podcast. No, please. I think people need to understand that that if Donald Trump loses this election, he's still the front runner for twenty twenty eight.

Do people honestly think that he's going away? I remember telling someone that back in 2020, you know, that he could run in 2024. Oh, no, that can't. Why are you saying those kinds of things? Trump is forever in this Republican Party. And I think what you're seeing is.

Going back to, you know, asking about Liz Cheney is, you know, you do see these exceptions of Liz Cheney and Jeff Duncan and Adam Kinzinger. But what you're also seeing is a Republican Party that is not willing and able to stand up against Donald Trump. And they weren't able to stand up against him after he was defeated in 2020. After January 6th, they had all of these off ramps after all the criminal indictments.

Why do we think that they're going to suddenly develop the non-existent backbones to stand up against him after this year? Well, and a couple of things. I want to go back to the first thing you talked about, infrastructure, because, you know, I will say I grew up in the Republican Party literally and figuratively. Right. My dad worked on Capitol Hill for many years and.

You know, I was blissfully ignorant of sort of the movement politics of the conservative base, Charlie, in my childhood, in my young career. And it really wasn't until Trump came along that I started my sort of the scales fell from my eyes. But.

This is a movement, for lack of a better way to put it, that goes back to sometimes like the 64 Goldwater Convention. So I have a hard time believing that the folks who really have worked hard on this for 50 years, 60 years, and put billions of dollars into it are suddenly going to fold up their tents when Donald Trump, if Donald Trump loses. I mean, I just don't see that. And to your point about the outrage machine, there is an enormous economy.

Around Donald Trump. Now, we'll get to that because a lot of it is funded in rubles. But but there's an enormous economy. And then the last piece is even before 2028.

Explain to me how a Donald Trump endorsement or a Trump family imprimatur is not the most valuable thing that a Republican challenger in a primary would look for in 2026. Right. Just tell me how that doesn't happen, because, again, it could be 35 percent of the party writ large or 40, 45 percent of the writ large. But it's going to be 60 or 70 percent of Republican primary voters.

No, there's that that will still be the case. I mean, unless something happens and I'm trying to imagine what it would be that would cause Republicans to say, OK, we're done with him. I mean, every every scenario that you and I could run through our heads has either already happened or is now implausible. I remember having a conversation back in.

maybe it was 2016, 2017, and we were playing this game, what would it take? And I said, well, if it turned out that Donald Trump had paid for one of his mistresses to have an abortion,

I no longer think that. I no longer think that there's any red line. So yes, you know, 2026, he is still going to have clout. But this economy that you're talking about is, I think people need to understand this, how much money and how many incentives and how it's continuing to metastasize. I mean, you know, look at the headlines from just this last week. So you have...

Tucker Carlson, who is platforming a Hitler apologist, you have the Department of Justice indictment suggesting that some of the most popular MAGA influencers are in fact paid by Russia. And you can sort of go down the list. Keep in mind that many of them are media superstars.

in, in formats that, that might not have even existed a few years ago. I mean, it's, it, it feels like the, the sorcerer's apprentice, you, you fire Tucker Carlson from, from Fox news and what happens? He goes off to X. Elon Musk is creating an alternative reality world out there. The amount of money that's sloshing around the size of the audiences. None of this is, is going away. And it's,

Until you have more people within the movement who say this is wrong, it's going to continue to grow. And so far, every conservative that has stood up and said, this is wrong, we can't do that, is excommunicated or exiled. And so until we have a much more robust pushback internally, I don't see anything changing.

So let's switch gears to the influencer piece you're talking about. So there are these guys that most, you know, look, I mean, the right wing media bubble is very, it's powerful. I think, you know, by osmosis, Charlie, it affects the rest of political discourse and media in this country. But these guys like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson and all these other goons, they're making $400,000 a month.

Now, you know, and it's like, oh, we didn't know where the money was coming from. Now, I'll tell you, Charlie, I feel like we've both done OK in our careers. But if somebody said, look, we'd like to pay a hundred grand a week to read this one thing, but don't ask any questions. And if you have any problems with it, just do it anyway. That's just like that's that's a hell of a lot of money to ask. No questions.

Well, yes. I mean, this is the this is important to mention. So one hundred thousand dollars a week to do one video plus one hundred thousand dollars signing bonus plus, quote unquote, performance bonuses.

I mean, maybe they are just rich beyond the, you know, the imaginary, you know, the dreams of average. I don't know. Most people would find that to be rather extraordinary. But then again, there's there's there's another question that you would say. And why, by the way, are we constantly pushing Vladimir Putin's propaganda line?

You know, one of the questions I have about this is like, OK, let's for the moment, let's pretend that they were completely duped. They were unwitting stooges. This is their defense. We were unwitting stooges.

They were still stooges in the sense that they were pushing the Russian propaganda line consistently. And you wonder whether or not at some point they go, you know, there's something weird about the fact that we are saying the same thing as the Kremlin on a regular basis. Is that just a coincidence? Is this because of our deeply held sincere beliefs? And then what about these big sacks of cash that keep showing up on my doorstep? So there's a little bit that strains me.

credibility here. Yeah. And also that that so many others in the sort of MAGA media ecosystem are racing to their defense as opposed to saying, well, that's bad news.

Yes, that's, I mean, Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk who are doing this. And I guess part of this is the circling of the wagons that you can't acknowledge what's going on. By the way, among the striking things about all of this, and there are so many striking things about it, and sure, you've looked at the indictment. One of the things that really jumped out at me was in their exhibits of the Department of Justice indictment of these Russian influencers are the talking points.

that the Kremlin wanted them all to use.

And I would challenge anyone to read those talking points and make any distinguished and make any distinction, find any daylight between what the Kremlin wanted them to say, the Russian influencers and the, the, the Trump Vance campaign. Right. They sound like, they sound like JD Vance's social media threats, you know, point after point after point. Now,

There's circling back to the beginning. We've gotten to a point where modern conservatism is indistinguishable from Russian propaganda. Now, you and I are both old enough to remember in the era of Ronald Reagan when that would have been absolutely unthinkable. Just just absolutely impossible to imagine. And yet here we are. So it's so ironic that we get this bullshit.

from the the you know the republicans today who say you and charlie sykes you have abandoned your principles you are the traitors what happened to you reed galen that you're not on board with this and we're like are you kidding me look what you're saying look what you're associating with we didn't change you have utterly transformed yourself under donald trump but let me all right can i can we can i just make a philosophical can i ask a philosophical question

Did they change or is that who they always were and they were just looking for someone to give them what they wanted?

Boy, I don't know. I wrestle with that. And I guess I come down on people are neither good nor bad. They're neither, you know, they're, human beings are complicated. Right. And I think that. We are multitudes. Right. Right. You know, and, you know, the line sometimes goes right to the human heart, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, between good and evil. I think that with proper intellectual leadership, right?

appealing to the better angels of our nature, people would have taken a different direction. What it's revealed, I think, is not what they believe, it's what they want and how desperately they want to belong and they want power. And so the beliefs of

that they thought that they had held, they held very, very lightly. Because once they challenged their access to power or to be relevant, they were willing to jettison them. So I think this is one of the things that I think was kind of the shock

To people like me, I'll be honest with you, that we thought that a lot of these conservative ideas were what conservatism was about. And it turns out that things like fiscal conservatism and belief in character and everything, this was pie crust thin on the top. And underneath there was this molten lava of something else that we did not fully understand, but which has been exploited in this current era by conservatives.

The reptilian instincts of Donald Trump. Right. And I mean, I, you know, I remember back in probably the spring of 2016, Charlie, having dinner with one of my best friends in Washington, D.C., and saying, you're not really going to support this guy, are you? He's the leader of the party.

I'm part of the party. You know, he's going to be the nominee. That's who I'm going to support. Now, of course, I think it was all easy then, too, in some ways, Charlie, because everybody thought he was going to lose, including him. Right. Right. So it was like there wasn't any real foul. Right. There was no harm. You

You know, theoretically until but and then fast forwarding to the week before Election Day 2016, when I had all sorts of younger colleagues of mine who I'd worked with going, hey, can you help me find a job? Can you help me find a job? This thing's going down. And then, you know, two weeks later, they're accepting jobs in the White House. Yeah, right. I'm like, wait a second.

You didn't want to have anything to do with the guy. You worked at the RNC or wherever it was and you couldn't stand him. And now it's like, oh, well, you know, a job at the White House. OK, a job at the White House is hard to turn down. But again, you know, it's like that old line in, you know, the first Jason Bourne movie, like, look what they make you give. And the thing is, there's no amount that they won't give to do it.

No. And that, of course, was interesting to watch in real time. And as you point out, I mean, in the middle of 2016, it was easy to basically say, OK, I'm not going to break with the party. I'm going to go along with him. But this is temporary. This is I'm just I'm just renting out my soul for just a little while because Donald Trump is going to be gone. I mean, I remember having lunch here in Milwaukee with with Reince Priebus.

You know, at the time was it was chairman of the RNC and he was going through what his post-election plans were with the absolute assumption that, you know, yeah, he was shilling for Donald Trump, but there was no way that Donald Trump was going to be elected. And so he wanted to make sure that, you know, he had different things. And then, of course, we know what happened. You know, he goes on. He becomes chief of staff. Doesn't work out well for him. That was the pattern for so many Republicans. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so let's, let's fast forward now to the next 60 days as we're here. Um, Trump is really not on the road all that much. No. Um, you know, he's, he's, uh, I think that like so many of the people we've already talked about here, Charlie, it appears that, you know, even the quote unquote professionals that came in to run his campaign have sort of just decided, well, you know, look, we're on the crazy train and we're going to ride it right off the cliff if that's what we have to do, because you know what? Hell, he might win again.

Right. And if they don't win again, and this is the other part, too, that I think is is is disappointing to me, Charlie, is that if Trump does lose just about everyone that's worked for him, that has some sort of background in Republican politics or Washington, D.C., will probably be accepted back into polite society. Right. There will be no sanction for them, which is the other frustrating part for me. But.

What give us your sense? I mean, you've observed this for a long time. You know, look, I think it's important to understand from my perspective that Kamala Harris has had an incredible seven weeks, but it's still a dogfight. It is so out there as you look at Republican voters and the fact that Donald Trump is, you know, might be leading by a point here or there. But certainly it's it's a neck and neck race. What are not MAGA Republicans, but what are average Republicans holding on to?

Well, first of all, you are right. I mean, it is it's on a knife's edge. Donald Trump can win this election because the Electoral College people need to understand that despite all the crazy, despite the meltdown, despite everything, he could win this election. The one thing that I think is different for I'm going to get to your question to say the one thing that's really different than than 2016 and 2020 elections.

I think is is no one's no one's cocky about this election. No one should be cocky about this election. We know what the stakes are and we know that he actually can win. You know, in 20 in 2016, I literally knew no one who thought he was going to win.

2020, I think that people might have been a little bit lulled by some of the polls. I don't think that's going to be the case this year. So I think that your average establishment Republican is just figuring, you know, the storm is going to blow over. They're just waiting.

And they've been waiting for 10 years. And maybe they tell themselves, look, something that can't go on forever won't go on forever. That sooner or later it comes to an end and then I can go back to doing what I am doing. The problem is, of course, the price tag gets higher and higher all the time for this Faustian bargain.

And I think they're naive in thinking that this election will provide him an off-ramp when they haven't taken any of the off-ramps that have been offered in the past. When you think about how easy it was for Republicans to have moved on from Donald Trump, the number of opportunities. And by the way, this is not just us saying this. I mean, even Ron DeSantis, the entire theory of his campaign was,

Surely, Republican voters will move on if he's actually criminally indicted, right? Because there's no way the Republican Party is going to stick with him. And yet there is still that sort of irrational optimism that if we just...

Don't, you know, set ourselves on fire like Adam Kiesinger and Liz Cheney and those, you know, and people like Reed Galen and Charlie Sykes. There's still going to be a place for us in a reasonably rational party and it's not going to happen. The victims of Trump derangement syndrome. Yeah, exactly.

And so what would you say if you were talking to an establishment Republican, right, which which I spend a lot of time doing both through outlets like this and through, you know, paid electoral communications? What what is it that you think that Republicans would need to hear? Republican voters would need to hear maybe not necessarily to vote.

For Kamala Harris, but to stay away from Trump, I mean, is there is there something you could say that sort of that at the, you know, at long last or have, you know, shame? Is there something or as you said earlier, like there's just no red line. This is where we are. The the undecided sliver is very narrow. And we you know, we just have to do what we can to, you know, whether or not it's help Harris or.

or, you know, find those extra voters that can get her over the line. What do you think? What do you think is there? I don't think there's a several, but are there little things that you can tell Republicans to get them to wave off? Well, in terms of the, you know, at long last, have you no shame? I feel like we've been saying that since 2017. Right. I feel like over and over and over again. So what I would and this is why, again, why I think Liz Cheney's endorsement matters is

I guess what I would say is after a certain point, they would go through and, oh, but, you know, Kamala is too radical or she's such a liberal. Look what she's going to do with capital gains taxes. And it's, you know, at some point you have to say, you know, aren't you tired of this? Aren't you exhausted? Don't you? Are you really up for four more years of Donald Trump, of having to do this, of having the party carry this weight?

And I think exhaustion is a very, very large part of all of this. And also in the conversations that I have with people, particularly the anti-anti-Trump folks who talk about their conservative principles and how as a conservative, obviously I can't vote for Trump, but I also can't vote for Kamala Harris.

I just think you have to change the paradigm here, that this is not about the right-left continuum. This is not about your tax rates. This is not about this program or that program. There's something more fundamental here. Do you really want to entrust the American Constitution to Donald Trump? And I do think there's a residual patriotism on the part of many of these people, that if we could find a way to tap into that, not to convince themselves, not to convince them,

Kamala Harris would be good for conservatives. Kamala Harris is right about this or that. You can make that, but you're asking me how would I talk to Republicans, Republican voters. And I live in the so-called wow counties here in Wisconsin. Sure. Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington County. And there are a lot of very conservative voters here. And they're not going to change their values. Right. But the key is to tap into what is fundamental in those values.

not get hung up on this program or that program. Right.

Do you understand what is really at stake here, how dangerous Donald Trump is and and how exhausting Donald Trump is? Well, and, you know, that's one thing that I've spent now nearly five years fighting alongside big D Democrats, Charlie. And that's one thing I've tried to impart to them on an almost daily basis, whether or not it's operatives, strategists, donors, activists, etc.

See, the difference between how Republicans wage a campaign and Democrats is to your exact point. You even just you just illustrated it. Republicans fight campaigns on a value system. Does this person represent your values? Democrats go, here's what I'll do for you.

And I think the issue with the two things is one values are in the heart. Right. Issues are in the head and are ultimately transactional. Right. And and you know, just like with Trump, you have to suspend disbelief. I think a lot of Democratic voters, unfortunately, have to suspend disbelief that they think that what they're being offered is.

has any realistic opportunity of happening, right? So you have to make a whole bunch of promises that everybody agrees, like, at least I'm saying the right thing, if that makes sense. But I think Republicans...

Actually, I think all voters are values based. Right. I think it's a different way of talking about it. But to your point, you know, if we talk about national security. Right. It's not about how many billions we've sent to Ukraine. Right. It's about the value proposition that America is the greatest republic that the world has ever known and that we are the leader of the free world.

And that to be an American is an exceptional thing. And do you want to be exceptional or do you want to be as bad as everybody else? Like Donald Trump says we are. Which do you believe? Right. And I think that's an important way to talk about it.

I think so, too. And I also think that she's tapped into something else that's kind of fundamental, which is, of course, you know, do you want to talk about moving on to the future optimistically? You know, do you believe that maybe our best days are ahead? Donald Trump is deeply invested in American carnage and American decline. You know what a shithole we are as a country, how we are. You know, you know, our cities are awful, making us fear one another at a certain point.

Now, one of the tests of 2024 is maybe that is a more potent message. Maybe people's fear and anxiety is greater than their hopes and aspirations. But I liked a couple of things that the Democrats did at that convention.

Number one was speaking of like just values, the fact that they reembrace the flag and patriotism. Yep. Right. That was really interesting to me because one of the worst things that I think has happened in the Trump years has been the way that the right has has basically hijacked the flag, which is right behind you there. Right. And the left has surrendered it.

The left, for a long time, was a little bit uncomfortable with it. Let's be honest about it. I mean, you remember when Barack Obama didn't want to wear the American flag pin because it represented things that were disturbing? Not a good moment. But they reclaimed that flag. They reclaimed patriotism.

They reclaimed strength. When Kamala Harris used the word lethal in her speech to describe the kind of military she wanted, I actually sat up. I thought that's an interesting word. That's not what you expect to hear at a democratic convention. And then when she ended with this.

you know, this, this sense of, of how proud we were to be an American, how much you loved America. This is a strong position because at the heart of Trump's campaign is this belief that these people are alien. They hate America. They hate God. They are, they are the other. Right. And to the extent that people can say, no, you know what? We share your values. Right. We may have different ideas, but we,

You know, you've had these discussions as well. If there's an assumption of goodwill in a conversation, you can disagree about a lot of specific issues, but still maintain the dialogue.

If I start the conversation by saying, by the way, you and your mother, you're not going to want to hear my ideas about education or about taxes. Right. And I think that this is one of the things that I think is a positive in this campaign is they're saying they start from we are Americans. We love our country. We love our children. We want to move ahead. Now let's talk about the specifics.

Whereas Trump has been saying the exact opposite. I think it's a potent message, but we'll see how it actually plays. I mean, I live here in a swing state and I will say that television ads are dark and frightening coming from the Trump folks.

Yeah, well, because they have to be right. It's what I call scare the white people time. Right. Oh, yes. Very much. I mean, because 90 percent of the party, 90 percent of its voters are going to be white. So to your point, in your neighborhood, they have to scare your your neighbors into either voting for Trump or just staying home. And and I would also say this to your to your point about the the proud to be an American piece. And this is another thing I try and impart to my Democratic friends is their coalition. Right.

most of their coalition, whether or not it's, you know, a particular demographic, like they, they like America, they love America. You know, if you're an immigrant family, you didn't come here because you hate America, right? You came here because it was a land of opportunity. I think also that, you know, whether or not it's Asian Americans, whether that's East Asian or South Asian, you know, Latinos, again, which is, you know, just a

a dozen, couple dozen different countries or the African-American community. Right. They are more culturally, not necessarily socially, but more culturally conservative than I think the leadership of the Democratic Party is, because there's a lot of, I think, fertile ground, Charlie, to talk about, you know, hard work, family,

Right. All of the things that is traditional conservatives we used to sort of take on faith literally and figuratively. Yeah. Those things are available to the Democratic Party because the Republicans have completely abandoned them. Yeah. You know, but I think the Democrats need to recapture that. I mean, you touched on it. You know, there is that that highly educated progressive elite in the Democratic Party, which does not necessarily represent the rank and file Democrat out there.

And I think that there was a long period of time where Democrats stopped speaking to their traditional base, the working class. You work hard, you follow the rules, and you will be rewarded in this country. I think that people like Bill Clinton got that. But I'm not sure that that was the message all the time.

There was a sense for a while the Democrats had become a barbell party that highly educated elites here, the urban poor here. But then the middle class, like, what are you – are you talking to us anymore? And Donald Trump managed to tap into that by saying, you are the forgotten Americans and I am your voice.

And clearly, there are a lot of Americans that feel that their values were not being reflected. So again, this is a project for a generation to turn it around. But I did think that who's ever calling the shots at the Democratic Convention at least understood the nature of the problem. And again, this is an election that's not going to be decided.

In Burlington, Vermont, or in the green rooms of MSNBC, it will be decided in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. And these are working class communities.

uh, non-college educated electorates in many ways. I mean, not, not, not, not totally, but Wisconsin, I think has the largest non-college educated electorate of any state in the country. That's not, I'm sure that's not true. I mean, of the swing states. Um, and so you have to find a way to, to, to appeal to them. Right. All right. So Charlie, as we wrap up here, tell us what else you're working on, um, and where our folks can find you and all the things you write about.

Well, I've been filling in writing for the Atlantic Daily newsletter, and I'll have a piece, I think, next week after the debate. And my Substack newsletter is To the Contrary, which is sort of unscheduled. But obviously, I'm going to be writing about what I'm seeing in this campaign and highlighting some of the things that I think tend to get lost. I think one thing that I'm really concerned about

is the fact that we've become numbed to the absolute insanity and extremism of Donald Trump, that we have normalized it.

that we sane wash the crazy. So I'm going to spend a lot of time basically saying, let's slow things down. And do you realize what Trump is doing here? Do you realize the kinds of ads that he's putting out are not racist dog whistles? They are foghorns. And I think this is, again, the kind of thing that

The one thing I worry about is going into this race, that the media, after 10 years of dealing with Donald Trump, has not figured out how to cover this man, has not figured out how to deal with somebody who lies or is so bizarre, and that he's constantly rewriting the rules of politics. So, and again, that's kind of what I'm focusing on. And you can subscribe to my newsletter on Substack as To the Contrary.

Well, Charlie, as always, thank you so much. Everybody out there, you can find me on Substack, also at the home front on Twitter and TikTok at Reed Galen on Instagram and threads at Reed underscore Galen USA. And please head on over to the union. Join the union dot us. Get involved, gang. We need every last body to get involved. Charlie Sykes, thanks for joining me. Reed, thank you so much. And everybody else, we'll see you next time.