What Happens After Trump?: Why Tim Miller Thinks Politics Can’t Go Back

28:11I think the Republican Party will mostly reflect Trump's nationalist, kind of America first type policies and affect going forward. I think that's what Republican voters want. That's what most right wing parties are throughout the world. Like this sort of idea that it's a classical liberal, as I mentioned earlier, free markets and free people type parties. Like those were really only the dominant right-wing parties in like the Anglosphere. It's like us and Canada, Australia, England. Like most of the world, the right-wing party is a blood and soil nationalist party. And I think that's what will happen here, has happened here.

28:53And so, yeah, I think that those of us who oppose that are in for a long fight. I think that if Trump loses next time and leaves the stage, there will be some things that will go back to quote-unquote normal, right? Like Trump is unique in various ways. Like, you know, his – like Putin, his like love for Putin, like a weird affinity for dictators. Like will the next Republican also feel that way? I don't know. Will they do the weird stuff that he does in campaign speeches? Like he's sui generis in a lot of ways, right? But I think that ideologically, I think we see the direction of the party, and it's towards America first.

29:36Coleman Hughes:So how do we understand Trump's terrible favorability numbers right now? Like he's a Harry Enten on CNN who was great with all this stuff. And as, you know, as much flack as CNN gets from people on the right and even in the center, I've never seen Harry Enten's political analysis or breakdown that isn't just down the middle numbers based. Yeah. So he did a great segment on just like how kind of unprecedented Trump's decline in favorability has been in the first year of his presidency to the point where it has to be that he is losing Republicans who voted for him. Something like, you know, 10 % of the people who voted for him, if not more, are really disturbed and have a negative opinion.

30:21Coleman Hughes:Where does that come from? Which policies are actually unpopular with even Republicans and which are popular? Well, I think two things are happening. One is he's losing some people that you wouldn't even really think of traditionally as Republicans. Like he brought in a lot of folks in this last time who are unhappy with the Biden economy, unhappy about Biden's age. I didn't feel like the administration, the Biden-Harris administration was serving them. They're unhappy with a lot of the COVID stuff. And these are people who voted for Trump only the third time, right? like either they're their first time voters or they've been past voted for Democrats like the so I think he's losing a lot of those people right because I think that they thought they were signing up for something different than they were signing up for you know they thought they were signing up for the guy that had the press conference with the groceries and was going to focus on getting grocery bills down and was going to get us out of wars and so I think that is one like the last people in I think are the first people out of the vote and I think we're starting to see that and then I think he's also got softness you know But interestingly, with people that are more into the America First populism, I don't know that he's losing any ground with Wall Street Journal type college educated Republicans that voted for him.

31:38There's a bunch of those types of voters that were my people, Bulwark people who left in 16 and haven't come back. But those that stayed, the college educated finance types, I think they're pretty happy so far. They're not like the tariffs, but generally are still with them. I think the people he's losing are the Marjorie Taylor Greene crowd. and the people that listen to the Manosphere. I listen to a lot of Tim Dillon. Keep my pulse on that sort of stuff. He's a comedian, kind of MAGA-ish. And he's like, what do we do? He's like, I thought I signed up for taking care of our own people first, going after the entrenched powers, going after the elites, as you mentioned earlier.

32:20And instead what I've got is tax cuts for rich people, deregulation for AI, you know, trillionaires. You know, we got a new ballroom funded by the richest people in the world. We're still, we have a new war apparently in the Caribbean now. You know, we're still involved in Ukraine, still involved other places. I think a lot of the America First types are unhappy with him right now. And I think that he's losing ground with them.

32:51Coleman Hughes:so what do you make of the caribbean slash venezuelan drug boat story because this is it's it's hard for me to integrate into trump's politics so you know obviously i think trump likes to look tough he likes to pick an unsympathetic victim and drug dealers are unsympathetic victims for most people so if you do whatever you want to them even if it's wrong a lot of people won't want to be seen as defending drug dealers. So I think he, in that sense, he has a good political instinct. Um, on the other hand, like this is one of the, this is just one of the most clearly unconstitutional, unfounded, um, frankly, ridiculous foreign policy moves that I've sort of witnessed in my lifetime in terms of, we're literally just killing dozens and dozens of people who were not at war with, uh, who are not terrorists by any conventional definition of terrorism um and and apparently a lot of people are defending it which shows really if you can do this who is for it i i did i don't understand i know marco's for it uh and i'm not maybe i'm not as familiar with the people in the free press ove and like so maybe some of your colleagues are for it i don't mean this sarcastically like who's for this i don't know it's hard to find many people at the free press are for it but i've seen people I'm talking about right-wingers on Twitter.

34:14Coleman Hughes:I see defending it. I see mostly anti-anti defenses of it. You'll see, and maybe I'm missing something, but I see a decent amount of right-wingers saying, oh, if you complain about this, you're on the side of the drug dealers. Or like, oh, the libs are wimbs. That's what I mean. Yeah, okay. But making an affirmative case, like I'm really excited about this, and I think that we should be bombing boats in the Caribbean and maybe doing a land war in Venezuela, is nonsensical to me. I think something gets lost I just like to bring up kind of times it's something I'm obsessed with it is we wrongly sent Venezuelans already this year to a foreign gulag like we sent people that were not gang members that were not criminals that were asylees trying to get into this country to an El Salvador prison based on their tattoos like we did that this year and so now you're going to tell me six months later after we did that and they luckily they got out because two other despots made a deal, Maduro and Bukele, to get them out.

35:19But now we're bombing Venezuelans and the sea and the Caribbean, and we're just supposed to say, take their word that these are drug dealers that are bringing drugs to America? I don't see any evidence of that. They haven't provided any evidence. The evidence we see is like, even when people say we think that they're drug dealers, it's like, well, actually, they were going to go to Suriname, and then the drugs are going to go to Europe. And so I'm against summary execution of drug dealers. I don't think that's what we should be doing in this country. But even if you were for it, they haven't even demonstrated that these are people bringing dangerous things to this country.

35:56It's insane. The policy is insane.

35:59Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I mean, my worry is that people are focused on the wrong aspects of the story. you know obviously it one has less sympathy for drug dealers than for commercial fishermen or any other kind of commerce but let's say the evidence dropped tomorrow and it was really solid and they are all drug dealers i don't think that that makes it okay that our new policy is just to just to bomb drugs randomly in the ocean which you know it seems to me it's not anywhere near coherent anti-drug trafficking policy. If Trump came out and he said, look, we've got a huge drug problem in this country. We've got, you know, we're going to identify the top sources of drugs, which are invariably going to be Mexican or Chinese in the case of fentanyl or whatever.

36:46Coleman Hughes:We're going to come up with a super coherent strategy to go hardcore on whatever that is. Okay, at least that would make sense, right? That would be passably in the American interest, but just bombing, but, you know, people are all focused on this second strike issue, Like the second strike was somehow a lot different than the first. To me, it doesn't matter. If they were really terrorists, if Al-Qaeda or ISIS had boats in the Caribbean and they were trying to do terrorists, they were essentially trying to kill Americans in some ways, you could do 15 strikes. I wouldn't really care. But the point is they're not terrorists.

37:23Coleman Hughes:And so the first strike is the problem, really not the second. But all of this then raises the question, if you're right, and really not many people are defending this, except in this anti-anti way, then what is Trump thinking? Does Trump have any kind of political calculus here? Or is this Marco Rubio's pet project, and he's in Trump's ear? What do you make of it from their perspective? I think it's a Rubio and Stephen Miller project. I think that, you know, look, it's hard for me to get inside Trump's brain at this point, And the types of Republicans that used to call me, my old colleagues in the first term, they don't call me anymore.

38:00I'm pretty far afield. So I'm speculating as much as anybody else. But I mean, I think that if Trump wanted to go into a land war, we might have done it already. And he seems to be a little bit hesitant on that. There's been a lot of smoke around that for a while now. And nothing's happened. So that tells me that there's at least a little hesitancy from Trump himself. and I think this is basically a combo of Marco you know is still a neocon at heart and he feels like he can get away with it in our hemisphere and has personal issues with for good reason not liking Central American South American communists I don't like them either but you know it doesn't mean we should be you know engaging in wars against all of them and then I think Stephen Miller sees this as all part of the immigration package.

38:49He wants the maximum authority possible for deportations and for surveillance and for militarization as part of the effort. And if you can make the case that we're at war with whatever, Central American drug traffickers and human traffickers, and that's part of the people that are coming to the country, then that gives you more, gives him more, whatever, legal cover for advancing the deportation regime. And I think that there's this notion that if we're in an emergency state, if we're in a war, you have more tools at your disposal. That's what I think's happening.

39:32Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I mean, every possible goal I construe in my mind, I find hard to match with the action. So if the goal is regime change in Venezuela or something like it, I would be open to that conversation. I don't think military regime changes have worked very well in the past couple decades. I don't think the American public actually has the stomach to finish the job. And with regime change, you get 100 % of the benefit only if you clear the last hurdle. So, you know, half measures are much worse than no measures at all. But even if regime change where the goal is say that's what that's what's in rubio's that's what's on his wish list how does bombing drug boats in the caribbean actually connect to regime like even with that goal in mind this particular set of actions doesn't make any sense oh we see you so tanker today i you know maybe it's hoping that majoro self self regime changes you know like the idea that he feels enough pressure that he just looks for an out and gets Putin to give him the Assad treatment or whatever and goes to flee.

40:42Maybe that's what's in their mind. But I hear, I also just like, what is the point? Again, look, I used to be a neocon. If you told me five years ago that we have this mass displacement crisis and all these Venezuelans are coming to America and there's an existing party in Venezuela that, you know, is, was rightfully elected and they were cheated. And if we can, you know, use some levers to put pressure on the existing regime, then maybe we can, you know, get the, you know, rightfully elected democratic leader in there. And that could ease some of the migration issues that is, that is facing all of us.

41:20I probably wouldn't have been for that. Like that's at least rational. That's at least rational. What would even be the point to receive? Like that already happens. like all the all the venezuelans already left you know i mean like there's some so i guess more or you know could still flee the country but um you know that wave of venezuelan um uh you know refugees like sileys like that already happened so i don't i don't know man yeah i'm as lost as

41:47Coleman Hughes:you to me it's great it's it's insane what they're doing so uh a couple weeks ago rob dreher uh wrote a piece in which he was sort of reporting from firsthand experience the extent to which the Republican Party has been infiltrated by men under 30 who are in the Fuentes wing of the Republican Party, the so-called Groypers. And if I recall, he was saying he was giving numbers like 30 % or something, like really, really large numbers that suggest there's a wave of people who have Groyper-type politics that are the future of the Republican Party. You know, it's hard to know what's going on. I never meet these people.

42:31Coleman Hughes:I would never meet these people at this point in my life because I'm too much a public opponent of Fuentesism and all the rest. But what do you, how big an influence do you think that sort of Nick Fuentes has had on the young Republican Party? Do you think he's the direction of the future? What do you make of all that? I don't know if he's a direction of the future. And some of this stuff is like your slice of this stuff kind of thin. You know what I mean? It's kind of thin. So I guess I'll speak to what I do feel comfortable talking about. Like first is, you know, like Adam Smith, man, supply and demand works in everything.

43:06Like what is the, like, when it comes to recruiting Republican operatives, right? Right now. As I said earlier, it's been Trump for 10 years. Who are the types of people that are volunteering, that are wanting to show up, that are wanting to go work for these campaigns? It's going to be Trumpy type. people and um and so now do they go all the way to being fuentes you know i i think probably some of them you know or that is what is appealing i don't like who is i did a i was working on a story i never wrote on like the new york young republicans like a gavin wax who's kind of a popular mega right young republican type and i remember he was making a joke about how nobody goes like he goes i go to the manhattan institute and the national review happy hours and it's like a morgue you know everyone there is 60 plus like that type of politics just has no appeal with young republicans so it's not surprising me that it's very mega people that are populating these offices and um i went to every year um at the end of the year i went to america fest which is a turning point usa conference that charlie that charlie ran um and uh they're doing it again this year i think i might take a skip on it this year but um the uh i i basically went just to kind of learn like i'm just curious what's happening like why are people here like what is it and um and i'd ask the young guy it's mostly guys entirely i'd ask them like why are you here like what draw what drew you here and it's like across the board anti-woke um i'd hate i hate woke i hate you know closer to covet a few years ago it was i hated the covet rules i don't like the wars i don't think we should be involved in the wars at all um you know and uh and then some economic concerns.

44:44Like, that's it. Like, that's what, that's the type of people that they're drawn in, you know? It's not like tax cuts, regulation cuts, and strong military and pro-life. Like, there's some pro-life. There's some Christian element in there, too, I guess I should say. But, like, it's a different crop than the old Republican crop. Now, how many of them are just, you know, in the Josh Hawley mode versus how many of them are, like, Nick Fuentes, like, active racist, misogynist? Like, that's hard for me to define. And like you, I don't know that they'd tell me, right? You know, if they had those views, really.

45:14But I think that at least, just to get a sense, I wasn't surprised by Rod's reporting, I guess, just given what I saw from the Turning Point crowd.

45:24Coleman Hughes:So what do you make of the mainstreaming of those ideas on Republican, let's say, the most popular platforms on the right? I guess you can broaden the question. And, you know, 10 years ago, it was like Republicans. What were the most popular shows? I mean, people watch Fox News. And, you know, before that, people listen to Rush Limbaugh and all that stuff. If you look at who are those people today, it seems to me it's Candace Owens. It's Tucker Carlson. And there's been this embrace of pure conspiracy. You know, Tucker Carlson was mauled by demons, allegedly. He knows that they're, you know, alien.

46:05Coleman Hughes:and they're aliens that are living underneath the ocean, and they've been there for 50 ,000 years. And Israel's behind absolutely everything, including the murder of Charlie Kirk and all this crazy stuff. And it's not to say that conspiracy hasn't had a place in American politics forever, but it does seem to me to be playing a more central role on the right than it has at any point in my life is is that um is that like a recency bias or do you think there actually has been a the right is more conspiratorial well i mean look i have tds so obviously i'm going to blame this on trump but like i do think trump ushered in a lot of this like you know i mean trump was i if you like look back at 2016 i mean ben shapiro basically leaves reitbart because of this you know and so this wasn't this isn't like that new in that sense right like there was this fight was happening back then in 2016 before between like Cruz type true conservatives and MAGA types that were more nationalist and also more conspiratorial you know um and and that fight is still happening now that Cruz and Tucker just had it out on his podcast a couple months ago um and so I think that that you know it is supercharged lately and I think if you look at the charts, it's pretty alarming, you know, um, of the podcast charts about who the big, uh, the big names are.

47:29Um, and you just mentioned most of them. Uh, and, uh, and, you know, I think that that is, uh, that's going to continue. I think that the, that the big platforms have a responsibility for this. I don't know about you, but just as like, this is a one man consumer. I'm getting fed a lot of Tucker, a lot of Candace, a lot of other really Nick Flintis and my tick tock for you page when I'm like trying to scroll through, I'm not getting fed a lot of, you know, I don't know what would be the, what would be the kid like normal wall street journal, like a typical Republican stuff these days. I like, I don't see a lot of that.

48:12Um, and, uh, And I think that the platforms are responding to like, you know, there's people watch it because they hate watch it. People watch it because it's titillating. It's interesting, you know, conspiracy. That's why National Enquirer was at the, when you went to the supermarket when we were kids, it was National Enquirer that was there right by the checkout lane, not the Atlantic or the Economist or whatever. You know, it's titillating. And so I don't know how to fix that really, but it's, I think it's objectively happening.

48:42Coleman Hughes:Now, it's interesting to me that you trace it back to Trump because Trump has always, for all his flaws, seemed to me to be fairly non-conspiratorial. And I'll issue a big qualification to that. What about his whole rise in the party was based on the idea that Barack Obama was an African and not a legitimate president. That's how he became president. If he had not done that, he would never have been the president. So his whole career was premised on conspiracy. And then there was the election fraud. Okay, so I was going to issue some qualifications. Well, those are two pretty big ones. But hear me out.

49:19Coleman Hughes:When I'm looking at Tucker and Candace and the kind of conspiracies that they're trafficking in, they are demons that are mauling them. Charlie Kirk is coming to Candace Owens in a dream. Epstein is blackmailing world leaders. people are having people killed um i mean your spiritual entities like this is like we sure upstein wasn't blackmailing any world leaders look there's no solid evidence of it it could come out to be true all that look i i i follow michael tracy on a lot of this stuff i think he's very good and if you actually look at it just from a pure what is there hard evidence for yeah rather than insinuation of what could have been true and what might be true a lot of things might be true.

50:09Coleman Hughes:I don't see hard evidence for it. I think it's kind of a moral panic and an obsession in the culture, the Epstein story, in terms of the conspiracies surrounding it. But that's a whole other rabbit hole to go down. My point is that if I look at Trump, most of the conspiracies he claims to believe is either things that just directly benefit him, like I won the election and I'm never going to say that I lost, so I'm going to invent whatever I need to say in order to be personally self-interested and get this win. Or I agree with you, the Obama one, to me, I class that more in Trump's nativism than in conspiracy thinking per se.

50:50Coleman Hughes:He played footsie with QAnon stuff, though. Look, I agree. Trump is not, I feel like Tucker's had a psychotic. Sorry, let me just say one more thing. Like, if you ask Trump about UFOs or whatever, you can tell he just doesn't take any of that stuff seriously. Whereas that's, like, endemic to what's going on of the conspiracy right, for example. Yeah. I just think I opened the door to it. I guess I agree with you that Trump is not, like, Candace has lost her mind. Candace is literally, like, there's a, you know, simultaneously is trying to tell people that there's, like, a French and Israeli assassin coming to kill her while she's at Dollywood.

51:24Like, it's like, you know, and it's hard to even, like, grasp. It's not, it's either a total show or she's totally lost touch with reality. in either way like that is a category difference from trump for sure but i i just i we talked we started the conversation talking about the gatekeepers around immigration and and i was and i was saying that you know i think sometimes the old elites and the old gatekeepers are are wrongly impugned because there's some value in having them and maybe they were out of touch with the the regular folks in various ways and and maybe they needed a to have their cages rattled to wake up to that.

52:04I'm for all that. But once you just eliminate the gatekeepers, once you just tear them all down and say it's all fake, it's all fake news, the enemy of the people, even Fox is fake when it's not benefiting to Trump. The last president was fake. The last two Democratic presidents were fake. Obama was an African and Joe Biden was always run by the auto pen. Once you convince everybody that everything's fake, there's no gatekeepers, that you can't trust any of the news. I just don't think it's like then surprising then that people will come in and, you know, come in his wake and advance even more kooky and extreme stuff.

52:42Like I, to me, I think that there is definitely a connection.

52:46Coleman Hughes:Yeah. I mean, so, but then what role would you assign to just how media has changed in general? Because, you know, with, with social media, smartphones, um, the, you know, there's been this massive democratization you could say of influencers, meaning if I'm a rando with a unique level of charisma, um, an ability to connect to people, a sense of humor, whatever it is, I can just get an account on rumble or Tik TOK and just become the next source of your political opinions. That literally wasn't possible in, you know, 2010. Like there were just so many elements, so many veto points you'd have to check in order to even get your face in front of a million people.

53:30Coleman Hughes:And is it possible that when we democratize media, obviously there's good elements to that. Like, like the bulwark can exist. The free press can exist. I can have a podcast. You can have a podcast and people can find us. That's a good element. I would count. I would count both of those as good. But the bad element is that perhaps conspiracy thinking sort of wins in a truly free marketplace of ideas with no barrier to entry. And maybe that's just a kind of sad commentary on human nature. That's how I see it. Maybe. I guess I have two thoughts. I just, I don't want to take away agency away from the leaders.

54:07And I just, like, plenty of failures of the Democrats. We could talk about it all day. I mean, like, the way they protected Biden was awful. And I'm happy to talk about it. But, Like the Republican leaders have totally abdicated any obligation to advancing the truth. And that was most significantly notable during the 2020 election. I mean, everybody knows it wasn't stolen. Every single member of Congress. And there were, what, 10 Republicans in the House and seven in the Senate that actually spoke up. And they've all been cast out of the party. And all of the main news anchors and all of the main pundits at some level went along with that hoax.

54:45like sorry like you know you can't go along with a massive hoax at that level and then say and then you know when people start not believing that that our democracy is real and start believing other conspiracies you can't start looking around and going like who's responsible for this it must be the changing nature of our media environment it's like no like people people have agency so that's one i will also say the algorithms are contributing like i just i think I think that, you know, if you go back, if we could just roll back the clock, like changing our news feeds, like going back to Facebook from being like, you're getting things from people you've chosen to follow, you've opted in to follow.

55:27Changing from that to a computer is going to feed you the thing we think you're most likely to have an emotional response to. I just I think we should you know um I'm a free speech person but I think at some level we need to put some regulations on this and I think we need to learn the lesson for AI because I think it's had disastrous consequences and um and I think I don't think there's anything by nature wrong with phones or social media uh but I do think that um a lot of you know the richest people in the world really are getting wealthy on the backs of like getting everybody angry at each other um and uh and i think that we probably should have been able to put some kind of basic constraints on how people got information maybe that wouldn't have worked by the way i'm open if i that wouldn't have worked and as you say it's just human nature and like technology and it's tough to you know you can't control the barbarians um uh maybe but i i don't know i look back and think maybe that would have helped us had we stuck with the old news feed.

56:33Coleman Hughes:To your first point, I think one of the best critiques of Republicans over the past year as a party is that, you know, when Democrats lost in 2024, there were at least elements of the party that were asking the question, what did we do wrong? How can we avoid this mistake again? Let's look inward. Now, I'm not saying that was the majority of the party. There's obviously plenty of people that wanted to stick their head in the sand and say, we're perfect, and it's just bad luck, and blah, blah, blah. But there were serious people. And some conspiracies, by the way, on the left. I hear it from people who come up to me and say, weren't the machines, didn't Elon break the machines?

57:10So there's left conspiracies, too, for sure. Not really among the elected officials, but among the media.

57:15Coleman Hughes:There's an element of that. There's an element of that. There's elements of apologism. But there was a serious conversation had in mainstream media among Democrats and Democratic strategists about what did we do wrong? How did we lose this one? How did we lose this one to the guy that we thought was done forever? Because he, you know, for so many reasons. When Republicans lost in 2020, the whole party just rallied behind, no, we didn't. We'd know we didn't lose, right? There was no, virtually no reflection and anyone who made even a passing attempt at that conversation was ostracized from the entire party.

57:50Coleman Hughes:So to me, that's like a fundamental critique, not just of Trump, but of the party itself, of the majority of the party. And I don't see how you get around that as an intellectually honest, how one gets around that as an intellectually honest person. I don't think most intellectually honest people are trying, you know, to get around it. I just, what I hear a lot from the smart people on the right is just like, it's kind of just this like acceptance. It's like the only way for us to get anything was through Trump, right? Like we didn't win any elections without Trump. The last guys didn't win. We don't win midterms without Trump.

58:23And in order to get whatever X agenda item it is for me that matters, you know, whether that's economic or for some people it's Israel or some people it's free speech, even though he's been terrible on free speech. You know, whatever it is, like Christian values. And I just, I accept that I need to have Trump in order to get that thing. And so I'm not going to challenge it or really question or even deal with it. If you call me out and say that it was not true, I'm just going to say, I agree. It's not true. But like on balance, we got Trump. Like there's, I think the smartest people, I give a mostly a Machiavellian kind of defense of it.

59:00Right.

59:01Coleman Hughes:And the interesting part about that is there's very little that Trump does where I agree with it, say, that he doesn't then later become a hypocrite on the same issue. So, for instance, I was very tough on Black Lives Matter and defund the police and all the associated policies that I think were terrible and led to increases in crime and were particularly bad for black communities. and Trump represented, however, imperfectly, like a law and order defense of the police, at least rhetorically. And then he pardons people that beat up cops on January 6th. There's a million examples of that. With the drug boat story we've been talking about, okay, he's tough on drugs, right?

59:40Coleman Hughes:Except for that he pardons the leader of Honduras who was convicted in a not at all shady or partisan conviction, in like a legitimate serious conviction by I think like a Republican appointed judge oversaw that, right? And for the very kinds of drug trafficking that he's now claiming to be tough on. And there's this remarkable shamelessness about the way in which he can just become a hypocrite on the issue that he used to stand. And very few people on the right will point it out. Yeah, and he has a little bit of a, he has Teflon on it, you know? And that is worth acknowledging just as an analyst because, you know, any one of those examples, you know, if a Democrat, like, showed that type of hypocrisy or that type of shamelessness, I mean, they would be mocked endlessly, obviously by the right-wing media, but even by, you know, the mainstream media.

1:00:36And so, I don't know. I think that it shows his power. I think Obama had a little bit of that, like, where he was able to, obviously he didn't do the type of stuff Trump did, but he was able to get away with things because people had an affinity for him and the critiques didn't land. But yeah, I mean, I don't know more to say.

1:00:56Coleman Hughes:I agree. I concur. Trump gets away with a lot of BS. You recently had a conversation with Olivia Nozzi who had a relationship with RFK and new salacious details of that have come out recently. What'd you learn from that conversation? What's your view of that story? Yeah. Look, I've known Olivia for a long time. I think that she's a super talented writer. I was like trying to in the conversation like understand like for me I find RFK so unappealing in every way it's like well how did this happen like how'd you find yourself caught up in that and I think that a lot of people were really um you know particularly in the media world were following the story because of like you know did you break journalistic rules by you know there's like the prurient element of this sleeping with somebody you're reporting on and writing on And I just like, for me, that part was less interesting than like the question of, you know, how did you become so enthralled to this person that has a lot of really dangerous ideas?

1:01:56It has, you know, maybe some good ideas on some things about, you know, the way our health system works, but like some really horrific ideas when it comes to vaccines and moving away from science, cutting NIH cuts. um like cutting research on a lot of things that could be life-saving like how do you get enthralled with this person and then and really help run cover for him during the campaign um while still being a journalist i i wanted to get to the answer to that question and like she just didn't want to go there i you know and i think that um it doesn't seem like she's ready to you know kind of really grapple with that um with that and uh you know she like agreed sort of passively with my assertion that he's not done a good job at hhs um but you know there was no real kind of depth of of like reflection on that part of it or maybe this there has been and just wasn't ready to share it at which point it's like okay well you're on a but you're on a media tour.

1:03:05So, I, I, look, I've been in the, I've been in the, um, fire before. Um, and, uh, I, I believe people are redeemable and that I believe in redemption. And I, and I think, like I said, I think Olivia is talented. I wish that, um, we had gotten, you know, the step to get to redemption though, you need like real reflection and accountability and like in, in certain ways it didn't feel like that was happening. Well,

1:03:28Coleman Hughes:it's possible she fell in love with him and as to why she fell in love with him, That's anyone's guess. As a wise man once said, women only want one thing and nobody knows what it is. Luckily as a gay man, I don't have to, you know, that's not a nut I got to crack. Yeah, yeah. That's not your department. Okay, so last question for you. What are your hopes for Democrats in the next election cycle? Obviously, Gavin Newsom is being, you know, just recently, I think Ezra Klein did a whole article on how Gavin Newsom is now the clear front runner. for the Democratic nomination, despite the fact that most people, I think, most people worry about how he'll defend his record in California, including how he'll defend that to even a liberal audience.

1:04:15Coleman Hughes:Like, how can he defend San Francisco to a New Yorker, even a liberal New Yorker? It's going to be tough. But anyway, what do you think the Democrats should be thinking about right now? And who do you see that you're excited about, if anyone? Here's what I would want to see. I want to see some Democrats try some bold things and different things. I just, I'm, the Democrats seem very stagnant. Um, and I think that they're hoping, it feels like right now it's like this, like we're in Groundhog Day. Like they're hoping once again, that Trump being so terrible and unpopular will lead to them being able to win, you know, without really changing that much.

1:04:51And I just looked back, I just mentioned him, the two most transformational politicians of my lifetime. I was a kid for Reagan, so I don't know. I can't really speak to that. It was Obama and Trump. And both of them were just huge departures from what came before them. I mean, Obama runs just aggressively against the Iraq war. He's only been in office two years. He's, you know, he's making huge promises about, like, what we could do differently as a society. And his middle name is Hussein. And he runs improbably against the existing machine of the Democratic Party and wins pretty easily. And then Trump, you know, is this outsider kind of like racist media, like a print, apprenticed reality show host.

1:05:38And he runs against Bush. He says it's Bush's fault for 9-11. Like he runs against the Iraq war. he runs against the Paul Ryanism and the cuts on Medicare and Social Security and entitlements and then he runs to the right of the party on immigration and crime and a bunch of stuff and myself included I was like this is crazy this is not what Republicans are they weren't going to vote for this he wins in a landslide and I just look at who in the Democratic Party do you look at for 2028 that's like I'm going to try something different and I don't even want to I don't even care what it like if it doesn't have to appeal to me as a moderate necessarily.

1:06:17It's like somebody that's going to say, I'm going to run really left on economy and really right on immigration. Or I'm going to run, you know, and be the peace candidate on foreign policy and really criticize the foreign policy establishment. And also run as like being very pro cop. You know, you could imagine a bunch of different things. Something totally different. I'm just going to like do run. my whole campaign is going to be about how I'm concerned about AI and we're going to go after the, you know, there are a bunch of stuff. And what I see out there is a lot of very conventional kind of thinking among the Democrats.

1:06:54And, you know, I think Zoran tried a bunch of different stuff in New York. We'll see if it actually works. But I think that the Democrats could learn from that. And there are a bunch of candidates that seem nice, seem like good people, seem like they'd fine presidents, but I want to let them all try to impress the American public before I start picking a horse. All right. Before I let you go, can you tell my listeners where to find your podcast? Of course, man. The Bulwark Podcast. Just search for it. We're on YouTube, thebulwark.com on Substack. And I appreciate you having me on, man. I'm trying to do more stuff like outside of our little Never Trump or bubble.

1:07:38And I appreciate you having me on to discuss. nice yeah it was a good conversation thanks tim all right thanks guys