The Bulwark Podcast

Yeah. Well, it's ripped from Shakespeare. It's a line kind of from The Tempest, but the actual line is, hell is empty and all the devils are here.

In their book, This Will Not Pass, Martin and Burns report that Graham called up White House counsel Pat Cipollone and told him that if Trump didn't step up to condemn the violence, quote, we'll be asking you for the 25th Amendment.

Graham delivered the same message directly to Trump in phone calls as reported by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book, Peril.

As Barbara Walter, who wrote the book, How Civil Wars Start mentions, you know, when kind of groups in the majority become groups in the minority, that's when civil wars have the highest risk.

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes.

David French is an opinion columnist for The New York Times. His most recent book is Divided. We Fall America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.

In that September conversation outside the steakhouse, as it was later described by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in their book, The Divider, Graham told the two reporters that Trump had just called him to ask how to deal with the scandal.

Subsequent reporting published in The Divider, the same book I mentioned earlier, revealed that Graham actually believed Trump had withheld the aid to Ukraine to pressure Zelensky to open an investigation of Biden.

So Wendell Berry wrote a novel back in 2000 called Jaber Crow. And you quote this in your book and in one of the scenes in the book, Jaber is a barber in Kentucky and he's cutting the hair of this sort of right wing Christian named Troy. A man who was convinced that they were surrounded by communists and they should all be rounded up and shot.

And Jaber, the barber stops, looks at him and says, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you. And the guy in the chair says, Where do you get that crap? And Jaber says, Jesus Christ.

And if you have not read Whitaker Chambers' Witness, you should. Oh, I have. Yeah. Amazing book.

I know you have, Mona. I'm saying for the others out there, everyone else out there. Yeah. No, no. That was an incredible, incredible book. I remember I came to it kind of late, but when I read it, I was just transfixed.

Yeah you mentioned the most important biographical note last there. I'm one of the many stars of your excellent book.

He said his favorite books were the Bible and the art of the deal.

You know, author of Sex Matters. Guilty, guilty.

I loved what you said about Holly and masculinity, because as you know, I wrote a whole book called Sex Matters where I talked about healthy masculinity and that we shouldn't link the words toxic and masculinity except in rare cases where, yeah, there are situations where it is, but we shouldn't think of masculinity itself as being inherently bad.

And I will say here on the air, what I've said in print many times, Mona, I imagine you're pretty disaffected from what is called conservatism. But I'm here to tell one and all that there is more conservatism in one paragraph of Sex Matters than there is in 10 Trump rallies.

Read The Corruption Of Lindsey Graham in PDF or Kindle formats at http://thebulwark.com/lindseygraham

Welcome to The Corruption Of Lindsey Graham, presented by the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Will Salatin.

The Corruption Of Lindsey Graham was reported and written by me, Will Salitan.

The last book I wrote, Learning from Loss, this was about the Democrats going into 2020. Democrats were unusually focused in that cycle on this concept of electability.

So there's this great book that Michael Lewis wrote years ago called Trail Fever. Eventually it got a new title called Losers and the thesis of this was he hit the trail in I want to say 1996 and followed around a cast of B and C and D list Republican candidates for president and his thesis was a lot of the kind of most interesting and ultimately used ideas come from this kind of mix of weird people.

You wrote Trump Nation, The Art of Being Donald, which was published in 2005, which is like in the distant mists of time now, right? I mean, it's like before the before times.

I was a research assistant on the first biography of him by Wayne Barrett in 1992. That's how I first got exposed to Donald Trump. It's 30 years.

Tim is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, host of the new podcast Crash Course and the author of the 2005 book Trump Nation, The Art of Being the Donald Tim. Thanks so much for your time this morning.

I am still haunted by that scene in your marvelous book Where Law Ends Inside the Mueller Investigation. And you begin the book by describing how you were listening on the radio and you heard Bill Barr preemptively releasing his spin on the Mueller report.

And your book is really a scathing takedown of what Barr did.

Mueller's fundamental flaw, Weissmann says, was a persistent faith in the Justice Department headed by his old friend William Barr.

The Mueller team had meticulously laid out their findings in their 448-page, antiseptically worded report only to be blindsided by Bill Barr's four-page self-styled summary, which Weissmann depicts as a nakedly cynical distortion of the truth we had just been played by the Attorney General.

I think another sort of lodestar here is Alan Bloom, closing of the American mind. You know, one of, he was very excited about, excited in a negative way, that is, about some of the intellectual philosophical currents that had wafted over to the United States from the continent.

I remember he has this long exegesis of the song, Mack the Knife. Do you remember that in his book? And this is based on Machenesser, which is like a German, you know, kind of vaudeville song from Weimar, Germany, I believe, which is all about a serial killer.

And author of a new book, Look for Me There, Grieving My Father, Finding Myself.

Look for Me There. Tell me about the title first, because I have to say that grabbed me.

And I remember the first time that I heard it was I was about nine years old and we went to Oriole Park at Camden Yards. It was a very hot mid-Atlantic summer day. It was very humid. And he was holding my hand and we got separated in the concourse with the crush of the crowd. And I fell behind him about 10 or 15 yards, and he never lost sight of me, but there was a lot of people. So he kind of ran back, maneuvered through, and he put his hand over my shoulder and he said, if we're ever separated, just Look for Me There.