S2 Ep1008: Jon Lovett: A Worst Case Scenario Comes Into View
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to have back former speechwriter for Hillary Clinton and Barry Obama, co-founder of Crooked Media, host of Love It or Leave It, as well as the YouTube show, Taking the World by Storm, called Speech Center. He does it with me. Go check it out if you haven't. It's John Lovett. How you doing, man? Hi, Tim. It's good to see you. Our show, Speech Center, by the way. Yeah.

It's the hit of the channel. It's actually kind of hurting my feelings. It's the hit of the Love It or Leave It channel? Yeah, that's right. I like praise, just as a general matter. But this type of positive feedback is particularly meaningful to me because the other guests you have on the channel are way more famous than me and more talented. You have all these A-list celebrities.

you know, kind of people famous on gay tech talk you have on and you, you make jokes together and, and, and yet the people still want me. That's nice. They want you. They want, they want the, the gay Republican versus gay Democrat anti-Trump. I don't know what you'd call it. Uh, the free song, you know, they want that.

They want the kind of faux tension that we offer. Okay. Well, that's great. I love it. Everyone should check it out if they haven't. Last time you were here on our side of the inner tubes, on the bulwark side, that was one week after the election. You cried famously as covered by Fox News Primetime. They didn't discover it. You put it in the fucking thumbnail. So they were like Columbus discovering America. It was set up for them. It was ready. Yeah.

So, you know, there's only a couple of times I've played on Fox. First, I'm pro-crying, so I didn't think I was insulting you. I've yet to cry myself since the election. I'm assuming that that means like I'm going to completely break down at Bourbon Pub and Parade at some point this year. It hasn't happened yet.

But I wanted to like take the lens back today instead of getting like specifically into the fucking Signalgate news and the micro. Sure. And just see like what you're feeling and seeing after 67 days of this shit. What's most acute to you? Are there any surprises, any changes since since you cried?

So first of all, that was sort of my one and done. I regret that it happened with you, but I, you know, it, it sort of hit me in that moment and haven't felt that calm since it is strange, right? Because we had that conversation before we saw what is now unfolding, which is basically a worst case scenario. Like I was talking about this with, uh,

John and Tommy yesterday, because obviously there are many ways in which what we could be seeing unfolding. There are many ways it could be worse. There are many ways it could be more destructive. They could be more vile, more feckless about basic rights and due process. But it's hard to imagine a version of the Trump administration unfolding in which they are doing more and bad things

Without getting the blowback that might hurt them, right? They are on this sort of razor's edge. They're pushing the bounds, obviously, of due process and deporting people without evidence, including people that have nothing to do with the roundups they're claiming that they do. They are playing footsie with...

the Constitution and just sort of claiming they're following orders, not following orders. They're ignoring Congress completely on spending. They're putting on tariffs. They're taking tariffs off. It's all very destructive, but it is like

In a way, I hate to say that it feels designed. It's really much more of a kind of gut instinct on Trump and a bunch of lackeys at random kind of operating on what they think he wants. But the end result is they are marching us down this path towards authoritarianism in a way that is not eliciting as big a response as you would hope. That's how I feel.

would feel about it. I'm just angry all the time, I think more than I am scared. And maybe that's because I can't accept what's happening or can't really feel where it's going. And then yet the strangest part about all of it is then you go out to dinner with some friends, right? And then you have a great night and then you buy new placemats for the table and you,

It's as bad as it could be, plan a wedding. Things are as bad as they could be without it feeling insane that normal life is still happening. And normal life is still happening. And I don't think it should stop, and I don't think it's wrong. But there is a dissonance there. There is something confusing there. Because we have spent years saying, this is how bad it could get. And it is getting that bad. And yet, the life carries on around it. Yeah. And yet the reaction is kind of less than you would have expected. Frankly, I guess...

on the surprises standpoint for me from now versus when we last spoke is it's a surprises or more is more about the mundane reaction than about the actions because I you're I I really do think it's about as bad as it could have been for now I mean like I think it's going to get worse and I think if you ask me to predict what 2027 would look like it's not as bad as I would have predicted when we talked but I mean to think that in two months and a week they would have all

already like created this type of economic instability that's pretty shocking already had a scandal as stupid as signal signal gazi that would already be like putting people in a foreign gulag that didn't that without due process i mean i got the elon stuff i mean i went back and actually listened to our whole pod to to level set myself and you mentioned um

I guess it's kind of funny, actually, in retrospect. You were mad about the fact that Elon was on a call with Zelensky. Yeah. And I don't even really remember that happening now at this point. That was only three months ago. But we didn't talk at all about the Elon dismantling of the government. Like the total destruction of...

any sort of research, you know, for, for medical research, the firing, the willy nilly firing of people. Like we didn't, you know, we didn't, we really didn't like project that. So in some ways it is worse. And yet that is kind of the dissonance, right? Like that is sort of why I'm like yelling at my phone sometimes. I'm like doing like selfie videos where I'm, where you can see my like anger veins popping because it's like, it does feel like that, like the reaction is not matching the action, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, well, there's the parts that I actually do think feel like what you would have expected. Honestly, them texting about imminent bombings over Signal with Jeffrey Goldberg in the chat does feel very 2017 to me. As you can imagine, Reince actually being the one to have invited Jeffrey Goldberg. Absolutely. A total clean switch there. And then, you know, Donald Trump threatening tariffs, turning them on, turning them off, causing the markets to be roiled.

But not so much as to create like a true crisis. Like that does feel like what we could have expected. Doge going this quickly, I think was, it caught everybody by surprise, their willingness to just claim an authority they do not have.

over the budget and just start eliminating agencies. That to me is, was shocking. We obviously knew that was the plan. It wasn't really like fully expressed, but presumably Congress was going to be involved. The deportations, the deportations, you know, like the idea that we are sending people to a Salvadoran prison without due process, that seems like a joke, right? Like that was the kind of thing that would seem like the kind of thing people would

make as a kind of dark joke about Trump 2.0 a year ago, right? That was the kind of thing people would say, oh, Trump's threatening that, but he'll never do it. That's the kind of thing Trump just says. And then not only are they doing it, they're doing it without anyone ever coming before a judge and they're claiming these things

these broad authorities over non-citizens without giving those non-citizens an opportunity to prove who they are or who they're not. And obviously that is a disgusting, vile, immoral, dangerous act.

even if it only ensnares non-citizens who have rights in this country, there's the constitution, the 14th amendment due process. These things don't apply to city. They apply to people. If you read the diets, but it's for people, but that's, that's both because we understand that human beings have basic rights, but also if non-citizens never get a chance to say to a judge,

Hi, here's who I am. Here's why this is wrong. What about a citizen who has a tattoo? What about a citizen who came from Venezuela or whatever country they target next? We also aren't 100% sure that there are no citizens. Right. Of course. How could we be? How could we be? They won't tell us who these people are. Even the most recent reporting says around 261 people. Around. Around.

around, you don't know the number. You don't know the exact number of people you've sent to a fucking gulag in Central America that you have Kristi Noem posing in front of. I mean, those things are moving faster, right? Like this is a line that a lot, like I regret to use it, regret using it only because Elon Musk, I think also thinks it's a great line to use. But like, you know, the future right now is not evenly distributed. Parts of what we were seeing are what we would have expected. Parts of it are actually moving slower and then parts of it are racing ahead.

There hasn't been some great rise in deportations, right? They are not implementing their broader policy very quickly that they claim they were going to implement, right? Which is removing undocumented people to remove whatever their economic claims about what that would do. They are targeting people and they're doing it in such a way that only makes sense if what they are trying to do is build a permission structure for a host of deportations and efforts to lock people up without due process, not just non-citizens, but citizens too.

I have some very detailed thoughts about the El Salvador thing I want to get to, but I want to play a clip of you because this is actually quite related. No, no, it's good. This is a compliment. This is a mutual compliment society today. It's us praising each other. This was you when we talked right after the election, and I think that it is prescient about the problems that you're talking about right now. Let's listen. My main fear right now is...

That in facing a million different versions, a million different threats from a million different directions, we will win some battles, lose some battles. But by the end of this four years, we won't really recognize the country.

To me, I think that is what we're getting at, right? Any of these individual things, we can obsess over the particulars of them, but you're seeing this come into reality very fast. Everybody hates the fucking word normalization. I hate it. But you can just see everybody becoming accustomed to all of this very fast. I think that's the thing that's making me the most crazy about this, where there is not...

you know, like they've backed off some of their things, right? Like, you know, they touched the stove on the, on the nuclear guys, they fired them and brought them back. And well, everybody will talk about, you know, what's happening on the signal chain for a couple of days. Then who knows what happens next. But like, meanwhile, that like, that's what you're talking about. Like that the country will just be unalterably changed because so many of the underlying things that, that held it together will have changed. Yeah. Yeah.

A couple years ago, it was early 2017, 2018, maybe 2019, I don't know. But we were at a live event and this woman asked a question and it stuck with me. And she said, are we really going to have to hang Donald Trump's portrait with all the other portraits of the president?

And I understood what she was saying. She's like, can we just get past this and pretend it never happened? Right. Can we just hang it twice? Yeah. Right. Now we got to hang it twice. And I remember saying, no, actually, we're not going to get to do that. Like this is happening. It does reveal something important about the country. And we can't pretend that it was some anomaly.

Like, yes, this is changing the country. But I think what I'm realizing, too, is it's revealing something about the country and not in the way we like, oh, wow, I didn't know this many Americans would love what Donald Trump is doing. Of course, of course. But realizing that we have made a lot of assumptions about democracy to process the rule of law that we've treated as if they were like self-reinforcing.

Right. That like kids get a good they get a dose of democracy, of education when they're growing up and they learn about the Constitution and the founding fathers. And then we just assume people are kind of immunized against fascism because they love America and they love American principles. Right.

But then we watch this unfold and then you see Mike Johnson, someone who I'm sure thinks that he is a patriotic American who loves our founding principles. And then he says, well, if these judges keep it up, we're going to have to think about defunding parts of the courts that don't do what Donald Trump says. Or, you know, the National Security Advisor goes on Fox News and says, actually, I think Jeffrey Goldberg said,

snuck into our signal channel and we're going to investigate him for that. And espionage. And so there's like two big pieces of it. First, there's actually, let me say there's three. First, there is just the fact that these Republicans are willing to go along with this or are starting to fully embrace it. Right. It's like they weren't in the mood for sex when it started. But by the end,

they're having a blast. You know what I mean? It's like that seems to be like kind of their vibe. I had to get warned. They didn't think he was their type. Right. You know, until he got in the middle of the act. And all of a sudden, they're like, I love Mushroom Dick, actually. Yeah, that's right. That's great. That's perfect. That's the image we want to create right now. Then there's the like capitulation of institutions, the Columbias and the law firms. And

What's interesting about what Trump is doing there is, yes, he's finding the issues where there's divisions inside of these institutions. There are the lawyers that represent the big, like the Exxon Mobils, and then there are the litigators taking on the pro bono clients or the kind of political clients, and these lawyers that just want the money are like, what the

fuck are you doing? Like stop jeopardizing my bag. And then at Columbia, I'm sure there are tons of alumni who are sick of seeing the protest hate, hate the fact that Columbia has been the center of this controversy, but even in a deeper way,

These are institutions that have not had to defend their basic values that they claim to hold, right? Columbia claims to be this institution of higher learning, of kind of small L liberal values, freedom of expression, exploration, curiosity, like core kind of values about what an educational institution is meant to do. But they violate them all the time. But like these institutions have

are illiberal in many ways that they don't really grapple with or think about. And all of a sudden they're called upon to live up to their values and they don't know how. They just don't fucking know how. And then you have the broader public.

who are either, you know, some are fully fucking engaged. That's on the right and that's on the left. There are people listening to this. They're fully engaged. They're fully bought in. But there are millions of people that are just not paying attention and don't really understand why they should. And we've done a terrible job of building credibility with those people. And they're just watching this unfold. And the big challenge is figuring out how to wake them up. But we've spent years waiting for them to wake up on their own. And it's just not fucking happening.

Yeah. And I mean, this is one of his advantages of just beating people down and wearing people down. You know, there's this critique of the media and the left that's like, oh, if you're, you know, the boy who cries wolf or whatever, your hair is always on fire. If you're always at 11, you know, you can't you can't rouse people when there's a real alarm. Like the problem is, like, we have been at 11 for like a while now. And like, that's not our fault for observing it. I don't know what the solution is to getting people to understand that it's 13 now or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know either. And part of the problem is...

That there's so many places where this had to, this required decades of like softening of the defense systems. Yeah. One of which is obviously the right wing media that is not now has, has slowly shifted and then quickly shifted from accusing the mainstream media of being liberal to accusing it of being fake. Right. That was a transition that was happening. And then Donald Trump really accelerated it, especially around January 6th.

But then there's how the mainstream media has reacted for decades. And one of the ways they fought against that is by either explicitly or implicitly believing that legitimacy comes from the right. That on a Sunday show for years, and this is like years and years ago, like when I was a kid, you would turn on the Sunday shows and when they did a round table of journalists, it would be mainstream journalists, mainstream journalists, mainstream journalists, conservative.

Right. There would never be somebody from the far left, but you'd have somebody as right. It used to be Crystal. It used to be Crystal. It used to be Crystal. Your boy. My boy. And by the way, Democrats do this too. Like when we're trying to prove that we're strong on national defense, we say, well, even Republicans like Colin Powell, right? Or even Republicans like John McCain, right? Even economist Mark Zandi. Sure. Sure.

And you end up with Democrats claiming and mainstream media claiming that legitimacy comes from being seen as legitimate from the left and from the right. And now you have Republicans that even when they agree, even when they want to say that Democrats have a point or the media is correct about something, like in the case of the Signal Chat incident,

They know that if they withhold that support, if they withhold that honesty, the story remains murky. That's true about the debt ceiling. That's true about tariffs. That's true about a bunch of different policy questions. And we talk about the value of shame and how much shame played a role in our politics. And when people realized if they abandoned it, there was nothing to stop them from doing whatever they wanted. That's obviously a big part of it. There's a word I come back to over and over again, just in my mind, which is forbearance.

Like I didn't understand how important for how important forbearance was in our politics that basically if a judge ruled against you, even if you were pissed, you didn't go to the cameras and say you were going to defund that guy. There was an understanding that in our system, you're going to win some, you're going to lose some, and you just, you can bear it. You can take it.

You don't have to rant and rave about your enemies. You don't have to declare war on anybody. You don't have to look around the corner, right? If you lose a budget fight and you don't get to end the Department of Education, you don't get to do it administratively. You wait, you wait, you show patience and restraint. And that a lot of what we build in this country was based on a collective understanding that people would be patient, that they would show restraint, that they would have forbearance. And these people have abandoned that. And that's why Kristi Noem is standing in front of a group of

prisoners shooting a video. That's why Pete Hegseth can go to the cameras and claim it's all a hoax. They have no sense of, yes, they're shameless, but they have no restraint. There's one other element to this I want to add, which is, you're right. Some of this is that we came to believe that all these things that made America unique or somewhat unique, at least there are a lot of Western countries and some others that started to adopt a lot of these same principles. But

that they were upheld by some kind of the document of the Constitution or these people that practice forbearance or the rule of law or the robed people or whatever, like that there were people out there that protected this system. So that led us to a place where when there were other examples of

of these types of corruption where people did not show forbearance, where people acted inappropriately when they acted unconstitutionally, that they would be restrained in some way or they would be held to account, right? That Nixon eventually has to resign. That

what we did at Abu Ghraib, like there would be investigations into it that would be bipartisan investigations, right? That if the Bush administration decided to follow the John Yoo interpretation of the constitution, that there would be other, there would be people, you know, either within the administration or within the courts, within the national security courts that would check it, right? That there'd be some other thing within the system. And like, to me, like over the first 67 days, like

In addition to having these guys totally getting rid of shame and forbearance, that's the other thing that is broken. I don't have any faith that there will actually be any check or any accountability on anything they do. And that they could do Abu Ghraib. They are doing Abu Ghraib again in San Salvador. And there's no option. I interviewed Mark Warner yesterday for YouTube. And I was like, what are you guys doing about this? And the answer is basically...

Nothing. We hope that the courts will intervene, but it's like the courts have no jurisdiction here and TBD on whether the robed people actually side on the side of the Constitution. Well, you had people like John McCain who had been tortured. Right. And people who had a value set and a mission that was not connected to their Republican politics. They were Republicans. They were Republicans, but they were also...

Virginians and Arizonans and veterans and whatever Irish they were. They had like, they had a core set of values and principles that had led them into politics in a different age. They also, by the way, consumed a bunch of as individuals, they consumed the mainstream media. I mean, we we've talked about this before. It was always a bit of theater, right? Like

Republicans would bash the mainstream press, but they would read it and care about it. And by the way, it was left. It was biased towards the left. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the mainstream press to this day, it treats Republicans like antagonists and Democrats like protagonists. Democrats are inherently the heroes and Republicans are inherently they're kind of trying to stop their foil. Yeah. Sometimes villains, but mostly just fine. All of that was true, but they read it.

They consumed it. There was a basic understanding of reality. And what happened is the right wing fringe through the media

slowly started eating more and more of your party, Tim. And its whole ethos is we are a rebellion within the Republican Party and within politics. Go look at Newt Gingrich's speech to the college Republicans in 1978. It's about being outsiders inside of a broken system. They are pilgrims in an unholy land. And everything about it is we are nonconformists.

not in charge. So we can be go a little further, we can make crazy claims, we can say we're going to do things that if anyone actually did them would be country destroying. And

Now they are in charge. And it's all the way down, actually. It would be better if it was in charge, but they're not just in charge. They're in total control. There's no mid-level DOJ person that's like, I care more about the political appointees. That was part of the Project 2025. Now the deputy fucking FBI director is a meathead

mega talk show host, right? Like the attorney general is in a miniskirt today, like at the arrest of somebody for a PR, you know, like it's these people all the way down. And these are people that their whole sense of the world of themselves, of their politics, it was all about being people who didn't have power. They were kind of throwing spitballs at the system. They were teenagers. They were teenagers with a curfew.

who are like, I want to stay out late and mom and dad won't let me. And it's because they hate freedom. And it's because they don't understand what it's like to be me. And they're terrible and they're stupid. And there's no reason, nothing makes sense. There's all crazy. And then all of a sudden their parents go away and they stay out too late and they destroy the car and they ruin the house. And they come to realize in the movie version, oh, maybe some of these rules, maybe mom and dad weren't so stupid after all. Maybe all my yelling and screaming was

wasn't actually totally fair. But these people are never going to realize that. Mom and dad aren't coming home. The house is burned to the ground. It's a sad version of that movie. Yeah, but they're grown-ups to beat the metaphor to death. I guess that's my point. They said their parents sell Salvador. Yeah, that's important. Even in the Nixon era, there was Larry Hogan's dad. And as you said, in the Bush era, there was McCain. There were still...

Even when bad actors took over or people that had bad intention for a particular agenda item, there were others around that were responsible. And I think going back to your original point, it's like that's the thing that feels like that is lost. I think when we were living through all that, we felt like...

Well, that's just how it is. Like, there are always going to be some responsible people around and there's always going to be the rule of law and there's always going to be. Right. And so there might be bad actors, but it's always it is always resolvable. Right. Like we are always going to be able to as a country overcome it because, you know, these other strong institutional powers and people's individual forbearance will come to the fore eventually after some damage is done. And like it feels like that is all rotted now.

All of these people, everyone, every one of them, right? Like why can RFK Jr. become the head of HHS while being anti-vax? Because we live in a world where vaccines work so thoroughly that people don't fear enough what it would look like to live in a world without

without them, right? Why can we put someone like Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice? Because people take as a baseline, as table stakes, that they don't live in a world where political prosecutions are happening left and right. Where the government can throw you in jail because of your tattoo. Like that's not a risk that they, it's not an acute risk to them.

Right, like, Lutnik can say, oh, buy Tesla stock, right? Because he takes for granted that America is a society where there's been tons of corruption. There are tons of ways where big businesses buy influence. There's lobbying. There's a whole bunch of problems. But for the most part, we know that

If there's somewhere where you got to give somebody a million dollars to get a permit for a building or you need to know the right people in order to do a startup, if that became the normal in this country, it would destroy the thing that made America's economy the envy of the world, the economy where he got personally rich. They are children.

who don't respect or understand the systems that were built and how it made this country so great. And now they are tearing at the foundations of that thing because they are either stupid or careless or vile. And we will live with the repercussions.

I promise you, people, we've got a little bit of, I don't know if I want to call it light, but we've got some actionable things that we can do about this. It's not utter despair, this podcast. The end will have some stuff that's not utter despair, but we've got to go deeper into the muck before we get there.

What I really wanted to have you on, my original plan actually was I was like, love it cried a week after the election. I want to have a month for the 100th day episode to get an update on whether he wants to cry again after 100 days. But I texted you earlier this week because I was having dinner with my friend.

As you mentioned earlier, like life is going on. I do find joy. I do have joy in my life. Other things I was doing. I usually when I'm at dinner with friends, I'm not like talking about Donald Trump. Like I'm just finding other other things in life where we can celebrate each other's company. But I was so upset about the particular case.

of this Venezuelan named Andree, you know, who is the makeup artist we've now seen the pictures of who has been sent to this since Salvador Gulag. And my friend was saying this in a nice way because he's also mad, but he's like, it feels like you're particularly mad about this because like as a gay person, you know, you can like feel like,

in a more, even more personal way, the plight of this young man. Right. And like, and that's true. I was having these visions of like what it would be like to just be like pulled out, to just be like grabbed by some cops and had your head shaved and like clothes stripped from you and like, and shackled and slapped. Like he calls for his mother. It's just, it's unimaginable. And even, and so I was like, I need another gay to talk about that with, but even, but since then we have a couple of other examples that have come up, a guy, a refugee guy that was a refugee EM, uh,

Went to Columbia, came here the right way, came to America in the Houston airport, gets detained because of a tattoo. No record. Just today, Miami Herald is reporting this guy, Frangel Mota, you know, similar type story. There's the guy that had the autism awareness tattoo. I don't know if there's a ton of gang members with autism awareness tattoos. It feels a little out of, you know, out of type. And the whole thing just has me so...

wrapped around the axle and we're doing this and and we have now as you mentioned earlier christy gnome goes down there last night stands in front of a cage with all these shirtless men that we've that are shackled and used as props and it's like we may have done these types of things before with internment but like doing this like type of propaganda like this is what the vietcong did right

This has taken from me what is fundamental about the country. And that, combined with this particular story of Andree, me both losing my naivete about America as a shining city on a hill and imagining what it might be like as a gay makeup artist to be sent to this gulag. I don't understand how it can be tolerable. I wonder where you're at on it.

Just think about what had to happen, right, for Nome to get that shot, right? They made those prisoners all line up and face the cameras and stand there under, you know, God knows what, only threat. By the way, those pictures in front of the Salvadoran prisoners, right? Salvador prisoners. Those are Salvador prisoners. Those are not the prisoners that she sent there or was part of sending there. And you're just going to use them as props to film this video. And what does she say in that video? She says some version of, if you're a violent immigrant, this could happen to you. This is where we might send you.

Now, that prison, it's only been open for a couple years, was opened by this right-wing government as part of a state of emergency to crack down on people.

gangs. We have now sent some unknown number, let's say it's like 260 some odd people there, because they are claimed by this administration to be members of this gang, but not because they were convicted of a crime that resulted... And by the way, they may have... These people were in detention. I don't know what they did. I don't know who they are. We haven't been told anything. Some of these guys, I'm sure, are terrible and unsavory figures. But

They are now in a prison. They've not just been deported to Venezuela, their country of origin, or deported to another country for some reason. They're in a prison. How long are they going to be there? The Salvadoran administration of this prison about the Salvadorans, they are holding people indefinitely as part of this state of emergency. They're just holding people. They're just saying these people are not fit for society. We're holding them. In America, we don't do that.

We don't do that. We, we, if, if someone's in a prison, it's sometimes you get it fucking wrong, but even if you get it fucking right, you get it right. That's part of the reason why we don't do that. People commit crimes. That's what makes them criminals. They're not instinctively inherently criminal. We don't lock people up because they are criminals. We convict them of crimes that makes them a criminal and they, they serve some kind of a sentence, maybe a long sentence, maybe a life sentence.

But we have now sent a bunch of people to a Salvadoran gulag. The government has not said who they are, hasn't said how long they're meant to be there, right? They have no sentences, right? We don't know what they're accused of. They weren't a public safety threat, right? Because they were in detention, the members of this gang that they're claiming they have, right? And I'm sure many of them are members of this gang. So they're just down there now. We'll see how long. We have no idea with no information.

And then it turns out that part of the way they've been doing this roundup is by just grabbing Venezuelan men who are non-citizens who have tattoos, even if they've applied for refugee status, even if they've applied for asylum. The one example about autism awareness that you mentioned that's exceptionally chilling is he was cleared.

He did the background check. They looked over the tattoos. It's for autism awareness. It's a fucking rainbow. It's just ribbon. It's a rainbow ribbon, right? It's not like it's not this, you know, I'm not a tattoo person. But when I see a rainbow ribbon, I don't think hardened gang member.

I'm sure there's some gang member somewhere in the world that has a brother with autism that cares about autism awareness. But I'm going to need a little bit more evidence than the rainbow ribbon tattoo before we send the guy to a fucking concentration camp in another country without any due process, without access to a lawyer. And, you know, and there's this aspect that's been playing out when these stories break.

which is that they grab somebody off the fucking street. They don't give you any information. They don't get due process. Suddenly they go to El Salvador and they're like, these are hardened criminals. And then you say, well,

Show us, prove us. And then you're, and there's a little part of you, right? That's saying like, well, I'm going to say they got the wrong guy. And then they're going to provide the evidence that says, actually, this person's terrible. Right. And it's like, well, fuck you. These people should be innocent until proven guilty. And yeah, maybe that you, whatever the, whatever the standard may be legally for deportations, which is different, right. That should be our,

American instinct, which is no, we don't throw people on a plane to a foreign country without putting them in front of a fucking judge. And until you give us that information, we'll assume you got it wrong because that's what we should do. Yeah. And that's what fucking conservatives should do. I, that's all I get. We're just, it's just like, Oh, trust us. The jackbooted thugs can, can come into, you know, can go onto the street and pull somebody off because they wrote an op-ed. I can only get to the tough scale later, but just like one more thing on this, they're trying to do what you're saying.

where they're trying to chill the criticism. The spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Trisha McLaughlin, I think she quoted Sam Stein. She's quoted a couple of other people like, oh, no, we've got more info than the tattoos.

But it's just that. And it's like, okay, well, show me. Show us the receipts. Bring it to a court. Bring it to a judge. A judge actually remanded you to not do this until you offered evidence that you flew these people to San Salvador anyway. So, like, I mean, like, the whole thing is, it really is, like, it's out of a communist-like regime. And it's just fundamentally, like, oppositional to what America is supposed to be about. We've disappeared these people.

And I don't know, man, like the, the pictures that the time magazine reporter and the story that he wrote about this, where it's like, you can't imagine what is happening to the people in these prisons. If they were beating Andre that we assume it's Andre, we don't know. I guess maybe there's another gay person that was, that was kidnapped. But if it's on trees, who's like yelling for his mother, I can imagine how dark of a place you have to be in. If

If you're like, it's not helping you to yell, to scream out, I'm gay. I'm a barber. I'm gay. This is not me. And crying for your mother. They were doing that in front of a reporter. So imagine what the fuck they're doing to him behind the bars. Yeah, he's still there. He's still there. Night after night. I mean, that is like...

Like this person, right, is now scarred. I mean, just scarred in a way we can't comprehend, right? He just was, by the way, doing everything we said to do, right? Applying legally, following the rules, doing what he was supposed to be doing. He got on the app, the CBP1 app. We created an app where you sign yourself up. This guy was not swimming. Not that it would be okay, but it's not like he swam across the Rio Grande or climbed the fence or whatever. He did everything right. And then this is the, it's,

The combination of cruelty and the kind of chaotic incompetence, which you can know about and read about in history, and then you see it unfold in front of you, and you see the way these things work together, right? Like, did they sweep this guy up because they're stupid dummies?

Do they sweep this guy up because they're actually want to make sure that among this group of gang members that they send to El Salvador, that there are a few people who applied for asylum, a few refugees, a few green card holders to scare the fucking shit out of anybody that might apply for asylum or claim refugee status. Right.

Or are they just so careless that even once they find out they make a mistake, nobody really owns fixing it because they don't really give a fuck what happens to people in their charge? Or somebody just a sadist and didn't like this guy when they held him. Who knows? Just doesn't believe people from Venezuela should be in our country anymore.

Or humans. Right? Either consciously or subconsciously, just doesn't care what happens to these people. We just don't know. And it doesn't really matter, right? Because this guy's life has been destroyed by these people. He's trapped. He doesn't know, right, that there are lawyers fighting for his life.

He doesn't know that his family has gone to the press. He doesn't know that there was a Time magazine story explaining all this. This is a place where you don't go outside. There's no visitation. There's nothing. He is just locked in a cell. He is locked in a prison. He has no idea why. He has no idea how long he's been there. That is a nightmare. And it could genuinely, we are now heading towards a place where it could happen to anybody.

any of us. And once again, that sounds like the kind of thing that will be seen as Trump derangement syndrome or, or hyperbolic. But if they can do this to people that applied legally, they're slowly marching towards doing this to citizens. They're already talking about wanting to denaturalize citizens for ridiculous reasons. You know, this, this is a small thing that's not getting enough attention, which is, so they, they, they grab Mahmoud Khalil,

without evidence of anything other than just having views these people don't like. And then they say, actually, we're looking at his application for his green card. And we think there are real problems there. They know, right, that correctly, if you lie to get a green card, if you commit fraud to become a legal resident, they can withdraw your green card. That's, of course, the way it should work. But again, back to like forbearance, it was understood that

The government wouldn't go after you and start combing through your records just because they don't like you. They don't like what you said. They don't like that you were at a protest. They don't like your point of view, right? This is what happens, right? If the DOJ, the process is the threat. Like when you have Pam Bondi and the Bonginos of the world in there going after Trump's enemies, you start having the FBI go through all your records as a business. You have the FBI going through all your information. All of a sudden you're in some kind of discovery. All of a sudden you're like, they will find shit, right?

And they are going to start making green card holders across this country terrified. They're going to make citizens who were naturalized terrified. You don't think this leads to citizens? You don't think this leads to people who were born here, right? Or they claim birthright citizenship isn't valid. So now they're going after American citizens who were born in this country. They're working their way up the ladder to anyone and everyone. They are now changing vandalism into terrorism.

All of a sudden, citizens are going to start getting, these are terrorists. They're going to be rounded up and sent to this Salvadoran gulag. DHS is working on this. Yeah, DHS is working on this. Kristi Noem with her little fucking Rolex watch standing in front of our prisoners.

Rumi, as a Oz Turk, because I haven't talked about this yet on the pod, Tufts University student. This is just exactly what you're talking about. There's video that has come out of plainclothes officers, some of them masked, like six of them descending on her.

handcuffing her. They're in unmarked cars. A guy in a hooded sweatshirt grabs her, puts her in the back of an unmarked car. This person is a 30 year old Fulbright scholar who is here legally. They have not provided any, even in the case of Khalil, totally wrong. But like he was the organizer of the protest, right? Whatever. But in this case, like she just like wrote an op-ed for the school paper. Yeah. And by the way, like why are they in plain clothes?

Why are they not in a fucking uniform? Like what? She's some kind of threat, right? This is just a student of Tufts, a very bright person at Tufts who has a point of view you don't agree with. And you're grabbing her on the street. She says like, can I call the police? And they say, we are the police. Again, I just, I mean, look, like fundamentally just,

If you care about humanity, if you believe about the dignity of every human person, like this is outrageous just in that case. But I do think this layers on to me. Like these are the things there may be things that are going to cause more damage broadly or worse things, whatever that happened. Like these are things to me that just go at the heart about what the country is supposed to be about. Can I just say, like, look, this is all horrible.

And I'm sure a lot of your viewers and listeners agree. And it's like, I know. That's why I'm here. I know it's horrible. I know it's horrible. And there's a lot of debate about how Democrats should or shouldn't respond. And it's very tactical. And it's also, even when it is not tactical, even when it's sort of broader, it's still quite political.

And like, you know, my general feeling right now is more is more. Everybody should be talking about everything and getting out there. I think what AOC and Bernie have been doing is inspiring. You know, John and Tommy went to this Ro Khanna event. I think what Ro Khanna is doing is great. I like what Chris Murphy is saying. And, you know, I was just in Wisconsin for the Supreme Court race. It was great to see a lot of people come out. And I just like...

Part of what we need to do, there's two bigger, kind of more broad than politics pieces of this. One is how do Democrats or anyone that believes in democracy build credibility with people that aren't paying attention just as trusted voices, right? And that's a big, hard problem, but it's actually quite a political problem. I think the other big and deeper problem is so much of what I think has happened, like social media, the phones, the atomization of our society, right?

It is like the atmosphere in which all of this is unfolding. And I think a deeper question is how do we build not just political solidarity, but social solidarity?

and empathetic solidarity between people again. And to me, part of what has to happen with this movement, this small d democratic movement, is it has to not just be about politics and about winning and defeating these people. It also has to be about what kind of world we want to live in. I'm getting like emotional again. I can't believe they fucking do this to me. We have lost something fundamental.

about how we treat each other, how we gather, how much of our time we spend looking at a screen, and how much of our time we spend in public spaces not interacting with one another anymore. And...

I don't know what it looks like and I don't know how it goes, but I do believe that part of what our politics is going to have to turn into is not just saying, hey, I need you to knock on these doors. Hey, I need you to make sure you get your friends to vote. It's going to be like, I need you to go and get a group of friends together and sit in a park for a while. I need everybody to like, we're all going to read a book. We're all going to choose a book together and we're going to read a book together. We're going to, we have to learn not just political solidarity, but like a kind of human solidarity again. And

Again, I'm rambling about this. Let me try to direct it because it relates to what you're saying about the politicians. Because this is my frustration. Is...

You can't do that without showing real emotions about this, right? Like a bloodless, you know, kind of opposition is not going to achieve anything, you know, and, and say what you want about the MAGA movement. Their emotions are probably, you know, the part of the emotional color wheel that we don't want to incentivize, but they do touch people's emotions. They make people angry. They make people prideful.

And I just like in situations like this, maybe I've missed it, but I've not seen a single Democrat or any politician, obviously no Republicans, like talk about what is happening with San Salvador with any sort of like depth of feeling.

And how are you going to draw people in if you don't do that? How are you going to draw people in if you don't have that? And sometimes some of these Democrats, it's one of these things where I ask them to show feelings and they do. And I'm like, ooh, maybe not that feeling. And I'm conscious of that. But I don't know. I'd like to see some people try. And maybe it doesn't have to be

the goody two-shoes empathetic feeling about this. Maybe it can be anger on the free speech side representing the woman from Tufts. I know there were supposedly a lot of guys that listened to guy podcasts that were very mad that their free speech rights were being trampled on from the government. And they wanted to say, fuck you to the man. Can we not channel off some fuck you to the man energy to the man that is pulling people off the street?

with six plainclothes cops because they wrote an op-ed we don't like, might that not resonate with maybe not everybody, but with some of the people who claim to be upset about their free speech rights being trampled on during COVID? Maybe not. I don't know. But I just think that trying to channel people on a more emotional level, I can't fucking hurt, I guess. Yeah, I agree. Part of it, too, is there's a feedback loop here, which is...

I think voters obviously don't trust politicians. That's a big part of why we're here. But politicians really don't trust voters either. And so they feel like

If they go to that place, right, that just purely moral, ethical, kind of not political place of like, this is wrong. This is why it's wrong. Like, I need you to join me, that the people won't be there, right? And they're not wrong right now. They're just not wrong. They're not wrong. And so, like, what do we do? Like, one of my favorite political speeches, probably I would say my favorite political speech, what I view as the best political speech is FDR's 1936 convention speech.

It's the rendezvous with destiny speech. That's what people know it as. But he talks at the end of that speech about people in other lands who once fought for freedom have grown weary of the fight. They've sold their democracies for the illusion of a living, something like that. And we have to take on that fight for them. And that is what is now happening here, right? A lot of people, a lot of Republicans have given up

their core values for the illusion of a living, whatever that means. For Republican operatives, it's for power. For a bunch of other people, they're buying this deal, right? Which is we need a strong guy like Trump to come in and fix things because things are so broken.

It's cultural power. It's taking back some cultural power that they feel like has been lost from them. I think it was actually in a conversation you had with a historian about Ukraine, which is that the Ukrainians were so willing to fight for their democracy in a way that surprised Americans. Snyder, I think. And it surprised us. Yeah. And that stuck with me too, because I think what undergirds a lot of the fear right now, the unspoken fear is...

It's not that millions of people will show up in the streets of D.C. to stop this. It's that they won't, right? It's not that this will culminate in some great democratic movement that will be ugly and scary. It's that that democratic movement won't coalesce. And I do think our project over the next...

six months, next year, is to try to figure out how to reawaken that spirit of democracy. And that's why I've been struggling to articulate this too, which is why I find the kind of Luigi fanfic so disgraceful. And by the way, why I think throwing fucking Molotov cocktails at a Tesla is so stupid. It's not because I'm some liberal squish, although I am, and I view those things as wrong.

Though I do. It is because fundamentally, I remember there was this historian, Richard Evans, I believe his name, I may be having his name wrong, but he wrote these three books, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. And he gave an interview about the books about one thing he learned from them. And he said,

You will never out-violence the fascists. Why? Well, because at root, what is right-wing authoritarianism? What is the kind of the final form of right-wing authoritarianism? It is one person deciding how the rest of us live. And that's what an assassin does. That's what a dictator does. That's what a person who commits violence at a rally does. It is someone deciding for themselves what's going to happen to the rest of us. What is the core fundamental left-wing

expression of power. It is solidarity. It is millions of people coming together to make a choice for themselves and choosing what happens to the country. That is a protest. That is an election. That is a Congress.

And so what we have to do is build towards that kind of mass mobilization, that kind of solidarity and violence, individuals taking it upon themselves to decide what happens and where is anathema to that and makes that harder because it will enable the crackdown that we are already seeing unfolding. And what we have to think about every single day is how do we get to the point where millions of people are in the streets to send a signal to Republican politicians, to send a signal to their fellow Americans, or by the way,

A big enough protest that in and of itself can help is power in and of itself can shut down a city in and of itself can stop authoritarianism or force authoritarianism to reveal its horrible nature before the country.

I don't know where we're heading, but that's one of the places where we could be heading. And if we are, it requires forbearance on our side too. The other thing that would do, it would stiffen the spines of the people that are folding. And whether that be at Columbia or at the law firms or across the board, like if they felt like

There were people that would have their backs. They would act differently. And I think that it would also be the case for any Democratic elected officials that you feel like are not living up to the moment. And that's why that is my ask for today is that, and as I have before, is I just, I think that people need to call and pressure these folks to speak out more clearly about what is happening, particularly in the Tufts case and with regards to the gulag in San Salvador. Where are the protests right now?

No. There were student protests at Columbia. Agree with them, don't agree with them. It was people standing up for what they believed in. Columbia just gave in to the most flagrant attack on free speech that I've seen in my lifetime. The president of the United States declaring himself basically provost of Columbia, dictating specific departmental rules, dictating specific policies on a private university's campus.

Where is the protest? Where is everybody? Why don't people care enough? Why isn't there a politics that is inspiring people to take to the streets when these kinds of things happen? Why are we more geared towards the political fights we've had for 30 years than the biggest fight we've ever seen in our lives happening right in front of our faces and people aren't showing up? There's some rallies coming April 5th.

Hands off America. People can Google those. But no, I'm with you. I'm saying that because I'm trying to be helpful. I'm not that. I think it's going to take time to brew and we're going to have to rally people to shake them from their slumber.

You were in Wisconsin? Yeah. I've not covered it. And this is bad on me, but I want to explain why. Because maybe this will resonate with some listeners. I thought it was great that James Malone won the state Senate district in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He's a Democrat that won as a Trump plus 15 district in this place in Pennsylvania. It's kind of between Philly and Harrisburg in a rural Pennsylvania. And I thought that was great.

And I think it's great that people are out there like you in Wisconsin, that you flew out there, that Ben Wickler and others are rallying in this state Supreme Court race between Susan Crawford, who's the Democratic endorsed judge, and Brad Schimel, who's the Republican attorney general. Like, yeah.

It's just like we've fucking been here. We just have been here and it's just like we had this brutal loss that is going to cause so much damage over the next four years. And it's tough for me to get my dander up about state senate races when all the shit we've been discussing for the last hour. You only have so much room in your heart for action and for anger. And yet...

These local races do matter, and they're actually a place where people can have more control and can wrest back control in their lives and in their communities. So talk about your trip to Wisconsin, what you saw there, and what you think folks can do. Yeah. So this is a Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. This is not just about a signal. This is incredibly important. Basically, last year, or...

I'm losing track of time. I think this was last year, the beginning of last year, there was a Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. This judge, Janet Protasewicz, she won. That shifted the balance of the court from right to left. That's why Republicans were so upset. That's why they've tried to stymie this court now at every turn. What that court has never been able to do is kind of

put in place fair maps for the assembly. Right now, the Republicans had a super majority because they drew their own maps, right? Wisconsin is a 50-50 state, currently has six Republican House members, two Democratic House members. The assembly was gerrymandered towards the right. They're putting, they put in place fair assembly maps. They could put in place, if we win this race, fair, un-gerrymandered congressional maps.

Also at stake is whether or not they put it back in place, this 1849 abortion law. Just to be clear, so if Schimel is to win, if the Republican Attorney General is to win, that would flip the balance back to 4-3 Republican, and in theory, they could enforce the old abortion law.

In theory, they can enforce the old abortion law. They can put back in place the gerrymandered assembly maps. They can prevent fair maps from redrawing the congressional districts. They also will now have somebody in place that will rubber stamp basically anything they do to try to rig the electoral system towards Republicans, right? This is a MAGA guy. We got so close, right?

So they're being able to toss out Joe Biden's win in Wisconsin. If you have someone like Brad Schimel in place, who knows what could happen, but now they would be in a position to throw out election results. We're seeing this unfold in North Carolina right now. Republican judge lost that race. They are now trying to throw out votes they don't like purely based on the fact that they want to steal this thing. That could happen in Wisconsin. But more than that,

So Elon Musk has put $13 million into this race. It's fucking crazy. He's just dumping money into this race. Wisconsin came out and voted for Judge Protasewicz because they didn't want the 1849 abortion law. They just, they didn't want a right-wing judge. If

If Donald Trump is able to buy this seat for Brad Schimel and they're able to put in place gerrymandered maps, have somebody in place that's going to rule in favor of Republicans when they question the outcome of elections, that sends a signal. First of all, that's terrible on its own, right? It makes winning the presidency that much harder in the future. But also this sends a message, right? Right now there are squishy Republican House members who are not sure what's more dangerous to them.

Should be the more afraid of Elon Musk or their voters, right? Should they vote for reconciliation, cut Medicaid, cut taxes for rich people and hope that Elon Musk's money protects them?

in the fall? Or should they buck Elon, bear the attacks from the right, and trust that their voters will protect them? If Elon Musk can buy the seat, that's a big proof point for these Republicans to just stick with the program. And we don't want them to stick with the program. We want them to be afraid. We want voters to overwhelm and overcome the advantage that comes from all of this money. So the stakes for Wisconsin are incredibly high, but the stakes for the country are very high, both in terms of how this court could rule in future elections challenges, and also the message it sends about

whether or not Elon Musk's money can buy a seat. So if you're in Wisconsin, make sure you cast your vote. If you know somebody in Wisconsin, shoot them a text. Election's on Tuesday. Election is on Tuesday. How did it feel to be out amongst the people out of the studio?

It was great. We were in Madison. We were in Milwaukee. A lot of that is just about making sure everybody gets their ballots in. It was reassuring going to the doors. We went to, I think, 150 doors, something like that. And everybody knew the election was coming. Every lefty had gotten their ballot in and was making sure everybody in their life got their ballot in. That's what we have to do in Wisconsin, so who knows what that means.

The other little moment too, there were just moments of being out there with people that were just so gratifying and inspiring and a reminder that even that just being among people is good for you and good for the movement. It's good for people to be out there talking to each other. Get off your phones, get out of your house. You will feel better about things. Just, you know, you're knocking on doors and you walk by a house and there's just an older woman out there gardening and, um,

She says something like, oh, what are you doing? What are you guys doing? Oh, we're not going to endorse for Judge Crawford. Oh, thanks for doing that. We've got to help Judge Crawford win. And then there's just a moment of like, I can't believe what's happening. I'm so scared.

And you realize that like in our asymmetrical politics, it is completely normal for a Republican politician to just go on television and say that people that live in Madison, Wisconsin are fucking communist anti-American disgraces. And obviously Elizabeth Warren never goes on, on, on air on, on pods of America and starts talking about the rubes down there in Alabama. Right? Like that's not acceptable, but like,

It was like, oh, you know, the cities are out of touch. We can criticize Alabama on the podcast, but outside of it. What I'm just getting at is like, oh, you know, the liberal enclaves, we already have them. They're out of touch. Democrats are out of touch with the real people, all that fucking shit. And it's like, okay, yeah, we got to do work. A lot of political work we have to do. But like, can we give some due to the progressives in Madison and Milwaukee that have been doing their best organizing, who, if more people voted the way that they wanted people to vote, the country would be a much better place. People that are...

scared and worried for their country and really fucking care. Like, yeah, I get it. We have the engaged people. We need to do better than that. Thank God for the engaged people. Thank God for the people paying attention. They're doing the best they can just because their votes are assumed and accounted for. Doesn't mean they don't deserve a little bit of fucking love.

We'll leave it there. That's nice. That's uplifting. I'm smiling. Good. Thank you, John Lovett, for coming back on the podcast. We'll do it again in 67 more days and see how dark things are then. Everybody else will be back here tomorrow with an old friend. We'll see you all then. Peace. ... ... ... ... ...

No surprises

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.