The Bulwark Podcast

I keep thinking that the master key to understanding 2024 is a story but the filming the first Star Wars George Lucas handed a page of terribly clunky dialogue to Harrison Ford to scan it and said George you can write this shit but you can't say it.

And that is the problem with whether Republicans are on in vitro fertilization and these other issues they have signed up for a massive surveillance state for American women.

George Lucas wrote the shit but Republican candidates can't say it.

I have a book on religion coming out now I explain some of that stuff too

it's called I Once Was Lost my search for God in America did you find him?

There's a new book out, the Trump Reagan synthesis in foreign policy.

I tried to listen to a podcast with these two jokers and I only made it like eight minutes, also, I can't do it.

That's sort of how they if you're on the on the more on the you know council on foreign relations side of things or maybe not council on relations but something tank where you want to get a job you rationalize it by inventing this mythical Trump Reagan synthesis which does seem to ignore the fact that Trump is hard over against helping Ukraine, which would be the single most Reagan I think you could do.

We had a great exchange on your podcast when I was doing my book tour. Was it a tour? You know, my book podcast tour, whatever you want to call that and we got a lot of good feedback and I've been wanting to do a read-ux and you didn't editorial the K-vests and opportunities for that last week.

I know him and I thought okay we can have this discussion now keep in mind he's written a book since about how Black Lives Matter is the real insurrection but he's not an election denier.

I don't know how do you churn out enough chapters yeah on that topic well yeah essentially the argument was it was more right ranging and had more organization and funding therefore it's a real insurrection.

Defending like specifically the book Gender Queer for example like it you know it must be in this school library when in fact it's you know on a fundamental level it is really unimportant whether that book is in the library or not right if it's in the library it's unlikely that your kid is going to look at it anyway on both sides of this it's fundamentally unimportant right right and people have you know have put you know tremendous stakes on this on either side and you know it should be you know possible to say you know okay the the book that has the cartoon of someone sucking on a dildo like if that's not the library I think we'll be okay they can still google it people can still still google for it you know it's getable Amazon dot com other libraries yeah or exist yeah right people sort of have this idea that if you give an inch they'll take a mile and you can never admit that you know anything is is inappropriate for for a school setting but in fact then what that just ends up meaning if you if you defend everything your opponents attack is that they get to pick what your positions are and they can put you in this position of defending things that are not very defensible and so I think that the sometimes the left does not been as strategic on this as it ought to be concur strategy and defending human rights and defending gay rights can live together in harmony okay

and he also wrote a magnum opus about gay marriage called The Engagement we might do some gay stuff at the end

He wrote the biography Joe Biden the life the run in what matters now in 2020

He interviewed by and again this past January in his profile Joe Biden's last campaign created a bit of a stir

I think my dominant impression the thing that really I walked out of there and then became only clearer and clearer over time as I talked to his aides and everybody else Is that this man has no doubts about what he is doing?

You wrote a great book a couple years ago called wild land the making of american fury It's sort of related to this topic it covers the 9 11 to january 6th period and You know, you had been abroad in china You've written a lot about china as well from china and came home To write this story I'd like for you to kind of sum up what your main thesis was of it and i want to get into one element

I was gone for 11 years. I was in the middle east for a couple of years and then went to china and and was there for eight years And then came back and so i guess 11 years you have total and You know I don't have any illusions that we were the promised land beforehand But there were things that happened that did feel like a fundamental change.

Our first date was my first book, Independent Nation.

And one of the really fun things was not only debating her but seeing her mark up the copy of my first book with things like wrong in the margins and stuff.

Yeah, he wrote the famed Nixonland, now writes for American Prospect.

And you amusingly right always people are always like, isn't this kind of like 1968? And then now we've this year where it's like, okay, there's some parallels, some weaknesses, but I enjoyed you the DNC chair, Jamie Harrison was during this, this interregnum, where Biden was still stubbornly sticking around. He was like, you know, he was tweeting about how this country, the 10% of key voters are never going to vote for the fascist. And like, we can't worry about this. And we got to press forward. And, and you replied, does the DNC chair really think like this? Has he ever read about 20th century European history reminds me how in the 60s and 70s, how some democrats and pundits said polls indicating a Nixon landslide couldn't be accurate, you know, because people would never vote for a crook.

Yeah, it's Twitter brain, like, and it's responsiveness brain, my biggest observation going all the way back to 2015, when I was in the very first anti Trump super PAC was like, everybody that I talked to in Washington, politicians, strategists are just so responsive to like, what is happening right in front of their nose. And it's very challenging to get them to be like, wait a minute, this could end up going very badly. You know, what the opposite of kind of making every, you know, fraction of a second, you know, conflict into something that occupies all your energy, you know, is a fight you have to win. The opposite of that is wisdom, right? You know, I mean, is there no one in Washington, you know, like the giants of old, you know, who just kind of, you know, calmly sat back and I mean, think about, you know, I don't know, Game of Thrones, you're the master of whispers, who's just kind of like, you know, moving things into place and not just acting like a teenager dealing with, you know, the latest blow up in gym class.

You know, I like to say, you know, horse race journalism is great. It has its place, but it doesn't matter if the boys in the red MAGA hats blow up the track.

I mean, it's like once you came over to the other side, Tim, you saw how, you know, it's one big, one of my favorite things that I discovered in Nixon land was a detective novel written by E. Howard Hunt, you know, and kind of under a pseudonym.

I went off listening to Yasha Monk's new book as I walked with my dogs and a woman... Is your claim, by the way, that you were distracted by Yasha Monk's book? When you placed the dog defecation in the... No, no, no, no, no. It's not part of your defense, right? I do that every day. No, no, my defense is simply that I... We're not blaming Yasha Monk. Okay. I mean, most things are Yasha Monk's fault, but the relevance of Yasha Monk's book was really that I didn't notice. I was aware that a woman was shouting. I didn't really notice that she was shouting at me because I was listening to Yasha talk about Foucault.

Hacks is the best comedy that's been on TV since Office Racer 30 Rock.

Hacks won the best comedy Emmy which they were denied last year.

but even still the actors on the show he and Einbinder were denied it because the bear which is I just kind of hard to watch actually it's hard it's like it's just very boring.

Should Flaubert not have written Madame Bovary?

Anyways, then Chicago and you know, I always tease him because we did ABC together. He used to be with 538 and started 538 and then he was an ABC did commentary for ABC. And so I said, Hey, you know what made his reputation was a 12 election where he called every race right but mine.

her last book, which is one thing we need to talk about, She Proclaims our declaration of independence for a man's world. You've written a book about how women politicians should deal with this moment and well, I think that we've got one of those right now.

Your other book was Dear Madam President, an open letter to women who will run the world.

I should remind people that William, I believe, was William F. Buckley's first book ever, was God and Man at Yale.

And long story short, at some point I read an article in Rolling Stone of all places, and it was written by a great writer named Alexa Morris, who basically says, does Donald Trump, the title of the article was, does Donald Trump have narcissistic personality disorder or something like that? Does it explain him?

And I read this article and they went through, there's this thing called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that's put out by the American Psychiatric Association.

And I think only five or six of them, I forget how many are required in order to have a diagnosis. And he's like, checks every box.

And he's a sociopath also.

He's a malignant narcissist.