Andrew Clavin mocks Trump’s rare apology for Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a hollow capitulation to leftist outrage, contrasting it with media euphoria over his Supreme Court win while accusing Democrats of hypocrisy for ignoring institutional flaws like the Electoral College. Guest Max Boot, a Never Trumper, condemns Trump’s moral failures—tax cuts and judicial picks aside—as enabling white nationalism and undermining democracy, framing both parties as radicalized. Clavin counters with populist appeal but admits Trump’s rise exposed GOP fractures, leaving moderates like Boot politically stranded amid polarization. The episode ends questioning whether conservative principles survive when ethics are sacrificed for power. [Automatically generated summary]
The New York Times, a former newspaper, has sent a cracked reporter to discover what on earth is wrong with our country.
And it turns out it's white women.
I know, right?
Who would have guessed?
You might have thought our biggest problem was unemployment, but Donald Trump fixed that.
Or ISIS, but Donald Trump fixed that.
Or unconstitutional loony tunes taking charge of our government and replacing the structures meant to protect our liberty with racist left-wing diktats guaranteed to plunge us all into oppression and poverty.
But Donald Trump fixed that too.
So what's left?
Yes, it's those white girls.
Alexis Grimnell has studied these exotic creatures carefully by actually being one of them for many years.
And she writes, quote, and my hand to God, I am not making this quote up, after a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
The women who voted for him are gender traitors.
We're talking about white women, the same 53% who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, unquote.
I could go on, but that would be like allowing the Times to write my hilarious satire for me, which would be wrong.
But darn it, they're so funny, I just can't help it.
Here's some more, in which sweet little Alexis tells us how she felt about Senator Susan Collins' speech in support of Kavanaugh.
She writes, quote, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense I couldn't even hear through my rage headache, unquote.
That's right, Alexis has a headache, so we have to get rid of due process.
Hey, Alexis, how about preserving American freedoms by upholding the Constitution?
Not tonight, dear.
I have a headache.
I guess she has a point about white women.
Some of those dames are just plain nuts.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky-dunky.
Shipshape, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
I'm here in beautiful, sensationally beautiful Madison, Wisconsin.
I haven't been here for about 100 years.
This is one of the prettiest towns I have ever seen.
It is just absolutely gorgeous.
I have a view out my window of Lake Something.
There are two big lakes, Lake Something, and then on the other side is Lake Something Something.
And I have a view of one of them.
It is just a spectacular town.
And I will be speaking tonight at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
It starts at 7.30 p.m. Eastern, 4.30 p.m. Pacific.
And you can watch me on YouTube and Facebook.
So bring your leftist tears tumblers.
I will fill them up for you.
We also have Max Boot coming up.
He is a never Trumper.
We had a really interesting conversation.
I will tell you about it when we get to it.
What else have we got going on?
We've got stamps.
Stamps.
We have to have stamps.com because you know you do not want to go to the post office if you can help it.
We love the post office.
The post office has been my life.
It has helped me through so much of my writing career.
But just like everything else, I want everything in my computer.
I want to be able to get stamps at all the amazing services of the post office right from my desktop 24-7 when I want them with stamps.com.
You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, using your own computer and printer, and the mail carrier just picks it up.
Just click print mail and you are done.
It couldn't be easier.
I love this thing.
It's just cool even just to watch it, the printer stamp your letter.
Right now, use Clavin for this special offer.
It includes up to $55 free postage, a digital scale, and a four-week trial.
Don't wait.
Go to stamps.com before you do anything else.
Click on the radio microphone at the top of the homepage and type in clavin.
That's stamps.com.
Enter Clavin.
You can write to me and ask, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Now, I have to, you know, it's very rare we have to come in here and correct the mistakes, but this is a big mistake.
Yesterday, we talked about the Kavanaugh nomination and his confirmation, and we forgot to play the Trump happiness montage.
Print Your Own Stamps00:04:34
People have been fired.
Entire departments have been cleared out to correct this incredible mistake.
But here, finally, after all this blood has been spilled and heads have rolled, here is the Trump happiness montage, well deserved.
We're going to win so much.
We're going to win at every level.
We're going to win economically.
We're going to win with the economy.
We're going to win with military.
We're going to win with health care and for our veterans.
We're going to win with every single facet.
We're going to win so much, you may even get tired of winning.
Yay!
You say, please, please, it's too much winning.
We can't take it anymore.
I feel pretty.
Oh, so pretty.
I feel pretty and witty and gay.
We have to keep winning.
We have to win more.
Oh boy, was that ever deserved.
I mean, what a week, a couple of weeks, Trump has had with the economy booming and, of course, Kavanaugh getting confirmed and the renegotiated NAFTA deal.
He has been just incredibly on a roll.
Did have some bad news this morning.
Nikki Haley has resigned from the United Nations.
Apparently, she has been planning to do this.
They say that some of his aides were taken aback.
Maybe John Bolton was taken aback, but I don't know.
Trump obviously knew about it.
And it's said that she has been planning this for a long time.
She was going to serve for two years, maybe take a break, maybe come back.
She is a genuine loss.
She has been courageous, graceful, smart, on point.
It's going to be really tough to replace her.
And I won't be able to do my cheap S ⁇ M jokes about watching a beautiful woman slap around the Russians as my form of SM porn.
I always felt kind of bad about those jokes.
You know, I was making cheap sex jokes about a beautiful, accomplished woman like Nikki Haley, but that never stopped me.
Maybe it's because I'm like a sleazy guy.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, that's it.
So who knows?
She was talking.
Well, let's listen to what she said in her resignation.
It has been an honor of a lifetime.
You know, I said, I am such a lucky girl to have been able to lead the state that raised me and to serve a country I love so very much has really been a blessing and I want to thank you for that.
But I'm most excited.
Look at the two years.
Look at what has happened in two years with the United States on foreign policy.
Now the United States is respected.
Countries may not like what we do, but they respect what we do.
They know that if we say we're going to do something, we follow it through and the president proved that, whether it was with the chemical weapons in Syria, whether it's with NATO saying that other countries have to pay their share.
I mean, whether it's the trade deals, which have been amazing, they get that the president means business and they follow through with that.
See, that's why she's been so amazing.
She has been able to have this kind of grace, this kind of force, and the kind of power, but also get along with President the Donald, which is not always easy for people.
She was touting Jared Kushner, saying what a genius he is behind the scenes.
He may get the appointment.
Maybe Bolton, Bolton would be fun just watching the confirmation hearings.
Since if you remember, during the George W. Bush administration, they wouldn't confirm him because they thought he was just too mean to deal with those nice people at the UN.
But that would go beyond watching John Volton at the UN would be beyond SM porn.
That would be more like watching Roadhouse every day.
But that would be terrific.
Anyway, it is a real loss, and I hope she finds a place.
She hasn't talked about what she was going to go on.
The people were speculating: would she run against Trump?
But she says she won't do that.
Of course, she's not going to do that.
They were talking, what were they talking about?
A Pence-Haley ticket.
But that's not going to happen.
Trump says he's going to run again.
So it is, we're just going to have to wait and see.
It's just a loss.
On the other side, however, you know, one of the things, one of the big tactics of the left, of course, is facing, forcing people to apologize for things that you don't have to apologize for.
So you come out, you speak a fact, and you say, oh, well, you know, why should we trust all women?
Women lie just as much as men.
That's a fact, right?
And then the left goes nuts and they start screaming at you and they bully you and they hit you on Twitter and they hit you on Facebook and your boss comes to you and says, you're hurting our business.
We may have to let you go.
Saudi Apology Controversy00:16:07
So finally, you, you know, you beaten and bloody.
You go on and you apologize for something that you said that was absolutely true, totally true, but you apologize for some thought crime.
Like I was insensitive.
I was insensitive.
And then, you know, you think, oh, well, now I've apologized.
So they'll forgive me, right?
They'll back off.
No, no, no, my friend.
That is just like bleeding in the water.
That is blood in the water to a leftist.
They just come in and they devour you because the message they want to send is say only what we let you say.
That's the message they want to say.
So they always get so angry at Trump because Trump never apologizes.
He never apologizes.
He never, even when he says something that maybe, you know, he might even regret or we regret that he said it, doesn't apologize, never does.
Finally, yesterday, at the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, he apologized.
He apologized for the Democrats.
It was a great moment, cut number one.
I would like to begin tonight's proceeding differently than perhaps any other event of such magnitude.
On behalf of our nation, I want to apologize to Brett and the entire Kavanaugh family for the terrible pain and suffering you have been forced to endure.
Those who step forward to serve our country deserve a fair and dignified evaluation, not a campaign of political and personal destruction based on lies and deception.
What happened to the Kavanaugh family violates every notion of fairness, decency, and due process.
Our country, a man or a woman, must always be presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
It was absolutely right to say.
It was absolutely deserved.
The apology was right to say.
Of course, the left went nuts.
I'll get to that in just a minute.
But first, let me tell you about a new podcast from Wondery.
Wondering, great podcast really helped us with the first season of Another Kingdom.
But this one is a really interesting podcast about all the legal cases that nobody pays attention to.
There are hundreds of thousands of legal cases in litigation every day in the U.S. court system, and most of them don't reach the media's attention.
These are not those cases.
These are the cases that have riveted the nation and made a real world impact on society.
In the podcast from Wondery, Legal Wars, host Hill Harper gives you behind-the-scenes access to some of the most famous cases to have ever graced America's courtrooms.
You'll hear about the influential cases that provoked worldwide attention: Rodney King trial, Anna Nicole Smith's battle for an inheritance, and the takedown of gossip site Gawker.
Go listen to Legal Wars on Apple Podcasts.
The first episode is about the Hulk Hogan versus Gawker media case in which Hawker Hogan walked out of the courtroom with a multi-million dollar settlement.
That very case has become a symbol of press freedom.
You can find Legal Wars on Apple Podcasts wherever you're listening to this or head over to wondery.fm slash clavin.
That's w-o-n-d-e-r-y.f-m slash clavin.
It's a great show and you're going to have fun listening to it and you'll learn how to spell clavin, k-l-a-v-a-n.
So you got to listen to, you know, there should be, there should be a word.
There's no word to describe someone who is absolutely completely unselfaware.
But that describes the left and especially the leftist press.
Here is MSNBC watching the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and the left just going absolutely insane.
They're all coming in now to join in the celebration and they look very happy, Gene.
Yeah, they do look happy.
And there is this wall-to-wall happiness.
Well, everyone should pay attention to this because this is what power looks like.
This is what power looks like.
Republicans had the power to do this and they did it.
This is a terrible moment, I think, for the country.
One thing is clear, this president is only seeking to divide this country.
There are people in the hard cruel, I think that's the right word, right.
They're enjoying making fun of this professed woman who said she was sexually assaulted.
Let's make fun of her.
So why are these people?
Trump.
When's the liberal or the progressive side going to speak loudly and blow the trumpet?
Wait.
Yeah.
Well, I'm going to go to the next one.
Tuesday.
No, no, we're in between now and then.
When are you going to go to make up, start the fight?
There's nobody out there.
Where's Pelosi?
Where's Schumer?
Where's everybody?
They shouldn't be taking the day off.
I love it.
Just the fact that they're happy is an insult to them.
And why is, you know, this is the problem with the left.
He just nails it.
The problem with the left is they're not making enough noise.
They're not screaming at people.
They're in the streets of Portland and Tifa's in the streets of Portland directing traffic as if they had some legal authority and chasing down anyone who doesn't obey them and the police don't even do anything about it.
That's the problem with the left.
They're just too in control.
They're just not shrill enough.
They're not crazy enough.
They're not violent and nasty enough.
That is the problem with the left.
How have we missed it up till now?
It's unbelievable if they would just be a little bit louder, a little bit meaner, a little bit used.
You know, really get down in the gutter.
The problem is they're not accusing people of sexual molestation enough.
They're just being too nice to everybody.
That is the problem.
That is why the left keeps losing.
And take it from Hillary Clinton.
Hillary and Bill Clinton are going on a speaking tour because that's what the country needs today.
What the country needs today is Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Lock up your daughters because if you want to see what sexual attacks look like, they're coming back.
Bill and Hillary Clinton.
And here is Hillary talking about how we can make amends and bring this country together by treating the right with more civility.
You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.
That's why I believe if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again.
But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.
And you heard how the Republican members led by Mitch McConnell, the president, really demeaned the confirmation process.
Until we win, we can't be civil.
Until we win, we have to keep on with the screaming and the yellow.
You know, it never, it just never, the light bulb never goes on that maybe this is why they're not winning.
Maybe this is why the country works better when they're out of power.
Maybe this is why they should start to, you know, respect the democratic process.
I mean, you got people now, Alexandria, Google Eyes Cortez, you've got her talking about how we should get rid of the Electoral College because it's a relic of slavery days.
The Electoral College had nothing to do with slavery but what they don't want.
And they say this openly now, you know, because when they lose, the problem is the country.
When they lose, the problem is we have to get rid of the Senate.
You know, the Senate's not fair because there are just as much representation from Dakota, North Dakota, as there is from New York.
How can that possibly be fair?
Of course, that is the whole point of the Electoral College and the Senate is that the states get full representation.
If you have in the Congress, obviously it's different.
But in the Senate, you have full representation for each state.
And they don't like that.
Why?
Because they lost.
If they didn't lose, then it would all be fine.
So we have to get rid of the entire American system.
There should be a word for completely clueless.
You know, Essie Kopp was talking to Brian Stelter, and she talks about all the ways that the press was biased during the Kavanaugh fight.
And listen to Stelter's response.
Because just to name a few examples, The Washington Post published an op-ed written by, quote, Kavanaugh's ex-drinking buddies who believe he shouldn't have been confirmed.
New York Times published a story about that that includes Kavanaugh being involved in a bar fight 33 years ago during which he threw ice on someone.
USA Today ran a column alleging Kavanaugh was a child predator.
I mean, that seems kind of like an effort.
Well, there was also some sloppiness in the case of some of these stories.
And that's a different story.
For example, report, you know, the New York Times admitted they shouldn't have had an opinion writer go out and work on a story at Yale.
You know, there were some admissions about that.
There was some sloppiness as well.
However, I do think a lot of journalists were trying to figure out what really happened because, heck, the Senate really wasn't, and the FBI really wasn't able to go out and figure out the facts.
So the media did play a key role.
But I can understand why, to a lot of Americans, it felt like the media was aligned against Kavanaugh.
And by the way, I just want to say, Christine Blasey Ford was right.
She predicted all of this.
Remember, she didn't want to speak out publicly.
She called the Washington Post, but she stayed off the record.
She didn't want to be named.
And then in August, she said, no, I definitely don't want to tell my story.
She said, look, Kavanaugh's going to get confirmed.
She said, quote, why suffer through the annihilation if it's not going to matter?
And it didn't.
Clueless, clueless.
I mean, when did the press ever go out and try and get information that exposed Christine Blasey Ford?
They went out and got every time, you know, Kavanaugh scuffed his shoe, if he threw ice at somebody, if he said something about drinking, if he drank, all of that stuff came out, but nothing about Christine Blasey Ford.
It was, of course, it was biased.
It was one of the worst, most shameful episodes in press history, and that is saying a lot.
And one of the reasons the press, you know, comes up is because everybody in America wants to be a hero.
And there are very few heroes in America because very few people are under the gun.
This is a free country.
So they have to tell you, oh my gosh, everybody's Hitler, and that makes you a hero because you're standing up to Hitler instead of making a lot of noise about a duly elected official who's doing a good job.
That makes you a hero.
If you say, oh, women, women are so oppressed.
Women are not oppressed in this country.
Women are utterly free.
But if you say they're oppressed, then you're a hero.
Oh, how brave you were, how brave you were to come forward.
You know, they just love to hear that.
And one of the things about the press is they like to pretend that they are in a country that oppresses them.
If Donald Trump attacks them, if he says you're lying, you're biased, which they are, they feel like, oh my gosh, it's Stalin has come again.
But just as a reminder that there are reporters in this world who are really quite brave, there is a story out of, it's out of Turkey, but it's about a Saudi reporter, Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi.
And this is a genuine, it's a mystery, but it's one of those mysteries I think we all know the answer to.
He's been a real critic of the new Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is essentially now the leader of the country.
And Salman came in and he was supposed to be a big deal because he was going to let women drive.
He was going to have all these social reforms.
But his social reforms have come along with a political crackdown and he's been putting people away.
And Khashoggi has been, he's been in America, I believe, criticizing him from afar.
And the Saudis have really gone out of their way to show you that they can reach out from Saudi Arabia and they can get you.
There was a woman who was driving in the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, when she was pulled over by security officers, thrown on a plane, sent back to Saudi Arabia and jailed in Canada.
A Saudi student refused to stop making YouTube videos criticizing the kingdom's rulers, and two of his brothers back home were in prison.
They want you to know they can reach you.
So this guy, Khashoggi, is in Turkey.
He was getting some papers to let him marry a woman, a Turkish woman.
He was in Istanbul, and he went into the Saudi consulate there and left his girlfriend outside, his fiancée outside, saying, if I don't come out in a couple hours, you should call the police.
And basically, he never came out.
He never came out of the consulate.
The Turks, who are no amateurs at suppressing the press and suppressing dissent themselves, are accusing the Saudis of killing him, of cutting him into pieces and shipping his body out of the consulate.
They say people flew into the country, hit men flew into the country and killed him, which of course, you know, to kill somebody on a prominent dissenter on somebody else's soil is bad news.
That's the kind of thing Putin does.
Trump is talking about it.
Trump doesn't like it.
Here's Trump commenting on it.
I am concerned about it.
I don't like hearing about it.
And hopefully that will sort itself out.
Right now, nobody knows anything about it, but there's some pretty bad stories going around.
I do not like it.
Thank you.
You know, I don't blame him.
We've been trying to be friends with the Saudis because they've kind of tacitly accepted Israel because Israel is, what they're really afraid of is Iran.
So Saudi is tacitly accepting Israel.
So Jared Kushner has been over there trying to use them to broker some peace in the Middle East.
We don't want to lose friends with them, but at the same time, we can't let them go around killing people like this.
And it just points out that there are hero journalists.
There are people who are standing up against oppression.
Brian Stelter and his Ilk, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS are just a pack of liars and they're not heroes.
And when they get criticized, maybe they should start to look at themselves because if there were a word other than clueless for someone who has no self-awareness, it would certainly describe the mainstream media.
All right.
I've got some other things.
Oh, yeah, the mailbag.
We're going to put off the mailbag, I think, till Friday.
So get your questions in any way.
You know how to do it.
Go to dailywire.com, hit the podcast button, hit the Andrew Clavin podcast, hit the mailbag symbol, ask me anything you want, politics, personal stuff, religion, anything.
All my answers guaranteed, are 100% guaranteed, correct, and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Get them in, and we will answer them all on Friday.
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So send your 10 bucks a month because we want your money.
That will also get you the new season of Another Kingdom.
The whole new season, the first two episodes of Another Kingdom season two will be available to everybody on Friday, and you will get them on audio as well.
So all that stuff is coming up.
We've got an interview with Max Boot coming up, but I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
This will give you a chance to come to dailywire.com and subscribe, as you well should, for $100.
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what a deal.
So Max Boot is a huge Never Trumper.
And a lot of you are going to write in to me and say, why didn't you say this?
Why didn't you say that?
Why did you just let him say these things?
I told him that I disagreed with virtually everything that he said.
He is still a never-trumper, which seems to me at this point absurd.
Donald Trump, no matter what you feel about him and no matter how he violates your sensibilities, is doing a terrific job.
I think he is on the verge of becoming a genuinely great president, which is an amazing thing.
Nothing I would have expected, everything I didn't expect.
Boot has stood his ground.
He's a guest on my show.
I treated him like a guest.
I let him speak his mind.
You know what I think.
You know how I feel.
You get to hear me all the time, but it's worth listening to.
I actually learned a lot of the Never Trump mindset.
He is the author of a new book, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.
He's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a global affairs analyst for CNN.
Find out how Never Trumpers remain Never Trump.
Listen to Max Boot.
Max Boot, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
The corrosion of conservatism, Why I Left the Right, a very impassioned book.
I see things very differently, so I really want to hear your point of view and how you got to where you are.
Let's start with why you became a conservative in the first place.
Well, it's kind of a natural thing for me to become because I was an immigrant from the Soviet Union.
So like a lot of other people fleeing communist countries, I was naturally drawn to the most conservative anti-communist movement in the United States, which was, of course, the Republican Party.
And then growing up in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan, you know, he made conservatism cool.
He was the kind of conservative that I admired and wanted to become optimistic, forward-looking, inclusive.
Ethical Divide in Republican Party00:15:22
He kind of typified conservatism for me, along with other heroes of mine growing up, folks like William F. Buckley and George Will.
And that was how I became a conservative and why, you know, I wound up writing a conservative column at the University of California at Berkeley for the student newspaper there in the late 80s, early 90s, and went on to work at the Wall Street Journal editorial page, write for commentary, serve as a foreign policy advisor for three Republican presidential candidates.
So I've been a part of the conservative movement pretty much my whole life.
Those are very impressive conservative credentials.
And anybody who writes, I went to Berkeley too, a few years before you.
Anyone who writes a conservative column for that paper is a brave man.
Now, obviously, it's Donald Trump that has turned you away from this philosophy that made you feel that you are an outsider to conservatism.
Is that fair?
I think that's definitely fair.
I mean, when Donald Trump came on the scene and started running for president in the summer of 2015, I did not know a single conservative who had anything positive to say about him.
Pretty much everybody on the right thought he was this clueless clown, this buffoon who did not deserve to be president of the United States.
And so it's pretty shocking to me to see that now the Republican Party has embraced him.
And a lot of conservatives who once had nothing bad to say about, who once had nothing good to say about Donald Trump, now have nothing bad to say about him, at least in public.
I mean, it's been a startling turnaround, even though I think a lot of the original criticisms that people like me and many others made about his unfitness for the presidency have been amply borne out.
Can you be more specific about that?
I mean, just to put myself in a position where I'm clear about where I stand, I had all the same feelings about Donald Trump.
I gave him a clean slate when he was elected.
I didn't see any other choice.
And I did vote for him as opposed to Hillary.
I have not seen what you just described.
Can you be specific about what you've seen that makes you feel that the worst fears about him have been borne out?
Well, I mean, it's a daily litany of outrages.
I mean, this is somebody who says that he is in love with Kim Jong-un, who is one of the most vicious dictators on the planet, somebody who lies an average of roughly eight times a day, somebody who attacks the FBI as a cancer in our country, who tries to impede and obstruct the investigation of Russian interference in our election, which helped him to get elected, of course.
Somebody who I think really caters to the most dangerous sentiments in our country, such as racism and nativism, calling African countries whole countries, saying that the Charlottesville protesters, the neo-Nazis there, there were good people on both sides.
Referring to Latino immigrants as animals who breed and infest our cities, locking up children of illegal immigrants, paying off a porn star, according to his own attorney who pleaded guilty to eight felonies.
Donald Trump is implicated in a conspiracy to violate federal campaign laws.
Of course, Michael Cohen is one of only many people around Trump who has been ensnared in the criminal justice system, including his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, his deputy campaign manager, Rick Gates, his former national security advisor, Mike Flynn.
Now, imagine what conservatives and Republicans would be saying if this were President Hillary Clinton.
And so many of her senior officials have pleaded guilty to felonies and had even implicated the president in this kind of behavior.
And the president were daily attacking the FBI and the Justice Department.
Republicans would be in an uproar and rightly so, but they give Donald Trump a pass.
And in many cases, people like Devin Nunes are actually actively working with him to obstruct justice and to undermine the FBI and the Justice Department in ways that I think are unconscionable.
Now, all that said, I mean, I will grant you, I think if you're looking at it from a conservative perspective, I mean, Donald Trump has done a few good things.
And I think any Republican president would have cut taxes, would have appointed Supreme Court justices.
But my argument is that you are paying way too high a price for a handful of conservative achievements.
You're having to swallow an awful lot of rancid garbage.
Okay, I have a lot of disagreements with that, but fair enough.
Let me start this way.
When Donald Trump swept away, I can't remember, 16 or 17 other candidates who were very highly qualified people, a lot of them.
Didn't that indicate in some way that the Republican Party had lost touch with the people it was supposed to represent?
I mean, the fact that it was so easy for him to do that, didn't that indicate anything that there was a problem with conservatism and the Republican Party?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think that mainstream conservatism and the mainstream of the Republican Party have been losing credibility for years, including because of the war in Iraq, which I supported, including because of the Great Recession in 2007, 2008, where I actually think that President Bush and President Obama did the right thing to help us escape that disaster.
But obviously, a lot of Republicans were very embittered by the fact that their leadership supported this financial bailout.
So I think, you know, there's certainly mistakes by the mainstream leadership of the party.
And I think there's also been a growing populist revolt typified by people like Sarah Palin.
And this was what Fox News was catering to.
This was the sentiment that the Tea Party was channeling.
So I don't doubt that Donald Trump tapped into something genuine in the Republican Party and in conservatism.
But unfortunately, I think a lot of what he tapped into is very dangerous and indeed repulsive, because I think what he is showing is that there is a constituency for bashing immigrants, for appealing to white nationalism, for indulging in conspiracy theories and know-nothing sentiments.
I mean, I think these trends were always there on the right, even though I chose not to see them in the past.
But in the past, I would say they were not the dominant trend.
in the Republican Party or the conservative movement.
They were present, but they were not dominant.
And under Trump, I think those dark tendencies are in fact dominant.
You know, one of the reasons, the reason I voted for Donald Trump is it's a two-party system.
There only were two viable candidates.
The other one has a history of criminality, a history of obstructing justice.
The party itself has become radicalized to the point of embracing socialism, something you should know something about.
And it seems that when you have a choice between two parties, one of them is going to get in.
When you say in your book that you think the Republican Party really needs to lose for a long time, aren't you saying that this socialist party that is willing to do, for instance, what it's doing to Brett Kavanaugh should now be in control?
Well, I admit that the alternatives before us are unpalatable because what I see is that the Republican Party is marching far to the right into white nationalism and populism, and the Democratic Party is marching far to the left.
And it's leaving people like me stranded in the middle, essentially homeless politically, because there is no party that represents my view, which is kind of moderate centrist conservatism.
But let me, you know, and I can understand where you're coming from, but I made a different choice in 2016 for the very first time in my life, literally the first time in my life, I voted for a Democrat and Hillary Clinton, because even though I didn't agree with her 100%, I thought she was qualified for the presidency.
I thought she was knowledgeable, and I thought she was actually a pretty centrist, mainstream Democrat.
So much so, by the way, that the Bernie Sanders left didn't like her because she wasn't extreme enough for them.
And you said that she has a proven history of criminality.
I mean, I disagree with that.
I mean, there's no question that Clinton's cut a lot of ethical corners, and that caused me a lot of problems.
And I was certainly very hard on Bill Linton during his impeachment proceedings.
But if you look at criminality, I don't see how you can vote for Donald Trump because, again, this is a president who has literally been implicated in the commission of two federal crimes by his very own attorney and whose staff was riddled with people who are now convicted felons and who himself has cut ethical corners his entire life and shows no sign of having any moral compass.
So I admit that the choices between us were not great.
And that's why a lot of my conservative friends voted for third party candidates.
But you're right.
I think ultimately it's you got to choose one or the other.
And I chose Hillary Clinton and I don't regret doing so because in many ways Donald Trump has been just as bad as I feared that he would be.
You know, that's another part.
I do find that puzzling because we had eight years of a president who abused the IRS to silence political opposition.
It really does look to me that he abused the Department of Justice and the FBI to spy on an opposition political campaign.
He certainly used the State Department to lie about his failings in Benghazi.
Donald Trump does not seem to me to have actually, despite his many, many, many personal flaws, he does not seem to me to have transgressed the boundaries of constitutional governance.
I cannot think of a way in which he has spied on people or suppressed people or silenced people.
You know, the press complains that he calls them names, and he does, but he hasn't silenced anybody the way Obama tapped phones and really did come down hard on anybody who leaked to the press.
Is there some kind of divide between the stuff that comes out of Trump's mouth, which I agree can be egregious, and the things he's done, which don't seem to be that bad?
I think the things that he's done are pretty bad.
But first, let me just correct the record.
And it's just not the case that President Obama had this horrible scandal-plagued administration.
Actually, by comparison with other administrations, it was pretty squeaky clean.
He certainly did not have his national security advisor or his campaign manager pleading guilty to felonies.
Okay, so in the notion that Barack Obama spied on an opposing political campaign, that's just the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump has spread without any support whatsoever.
He claimed that Obama tapped my lines in Trump Tower, and Trump's own Justice Department said that's just not the case.
In fact, there was an ongoing FBI investigation of the Russian attack on American democracy in 2016, in which people in the Trump campaign were implicated.
And the FBI was investigating that, rightfully so, but they were actually being not nearly as aggressive as they should have been.
And President Obama didn't do nearly enough to call out that Russian assault because he didn't want to be accused of interfering in the political process.
So, you know, I would say, and I say this as somebody who voted twice against Barack Obama, who worked for John McCain and Mitt Romney, and I disagreed very strenuously with his policies.
But I think on an ethical level, Barack Obama is an ethical person.
I think he's a good person who is trying to do the right thing.
I disagreed with his policy judgment in many instances, and I thought many of his policies were disastrous.
But I didn't have any serious questions about his ethics, whereas Donald Trump is an ethical cesspool.
And he is doing, he has done things.
I mean, we have never seen the kind of blatant obstruction of justice that he is committing in plain sight.
He is doing before our very eyes the kind of things that Richard Nixon did only in private and we only found out about later.
I mean, Donald Trump constantly denigrates and runs down the FBI.
He fired the director of the FBI, James Comey, as he admitted to stop the investigation of this Russia thing.
I mean, I can't imagine more clear-cut evidence of a president committing obstruction of justice.
He does it on a daily basis.
I mean, he attacks Jeff Sessions, he attacks the FBI, he attacks Rod Rosenstein, all of whom are simply trying to do their jobs.
I mean, he's irate, for example, that Sessions recused himself from the Russian investigation, but that's the only ethical course he could have possibly taken.
And I don't agree with Sessions on a lot of things, but he was right here, and he's being attacked by Donald Trump essentially for not doing more to politicize the Justice Department.
When it comes to freedom of the press, I mean, he constantly calls the press the enemy of the American people, which is the kind of rhetoric previously used only by the likes of Hitler and Stalin.
And he has tried to back it up.
For example, he tried to get the Postmaster General to raise shipping rates for Amazon because he's irate that Amazon owns the Washington Post, where I'm a columnist, and the Washington Post runs items critical of him.
So he's trying to punish a news organization that is critical of him.
Now, it's certainly the case that he has not had as much success in suppressing speech or obstructing justice as he would like to see because there has been pushback from his own appointees.
There has been pushback from the courts.
We do have robust checks and balances within the American system.
And so, you know, Donald Trump cannot give full vent to his authoritarian tendencies, but the tendencies are there.
He is trying to obstruct justice.
And he is, I believe, supporting our democracy in a way that Barack Obama did not do.
And really, no previous president did, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon.
Wow, it's really, it is interesting how honest men can see things very differently.
I see it very differently than you do, but I appreciate your letting me know.
I'm out of time, so I just want to ask you one last question.
You have a blurb on here from Bill Crystal, and it has seemed to me that people who have your strong feelings about Donald Trump have in some instances lost the plot of the America we're all, I think, hoping to protect.
For instance, when Bill Crystal said better the deep state than the Trump state, I just thought, maybe is that not overreacting to the presence of Donald Trump?
I mean, to have a deep state, an administrative state that basically overrides the will of the people, the Constitution, isn't that worse than having a loudmouth president?
Well, I dislike this term, the deep state that Donald Trump has introduced into our politics, which was previously used in places like Egypt and Turkey to refer to authoritarian tendencies among their militaries to basically subvert the rule of the people.
That is not what is going on here.
There is not a quote on deep state conspiracy against Donald Trump.
What you see are dedicated civil servants and political appointees doing their best to uphold their oath to the Constitution and doing their best to try to protect America from a president who they believe, and I agree, is reckless and unfit to exercise the office.
A Very Scary Time00:05:00
And they're basically trying to constrain his most destructive impulses and to carry and to enforce the law and to carry out good policy as best they see fit.
I think what they're trying to do is a heroic, if not entirely successful, effort to insulate America from Donald Trump and not give vent to his worst impulses.
And so I think they're actually helping not only America, but Donald Trump, because if Donald Trump could do everything that he wanted to do, he would be in even deeper trouble than he is.
His approval ratings are low enough now.
They would be even lower if he was able to carry out every crazy crackpot notion that floats into his head.
Max Booth, the author of The Corrosion of Conservatism, Why I Left the Right.
I can only hope that I'm right and you're wrong, but it's been very interesting talking to you.
Thanks so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, I mean, and I know you disagree, but I really appreciate the civilized conversation.
I think that's the only way we move forward is by discussing these things in an intelligent and civilized manner.
And you're doing that, so I appreciate it.
I agree with you 100%.
Thank you very much for saying that.
Thank you.
Thanks.
You know, that is the thing.
I wish more leftists would come on, but they won't.
But it was really interesting to me.
I mean, I thought, you know, obviously conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants and the stuff about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
You know, I don't see how you can think that.
I do not see how you can not think that Hillary Clinton is a criminal.
He should read Ken Starr's book about the Clintons.
All right.
But I was glad to hear from him.
sexual follies.
So during this whole thing with the Kavanaugh hearing, as they were, you know, leveling these charge after charge, trying to bolster these charges, the woman who works with Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker basically said they were printing these things without really checking them because they wanted to bolster the charges of Christine Blasey Ford.
But actually, I think that backfired.
But Trump said this about young men at this point.
Well, I say that it's a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of.
This is a very, very, this is a very difficult time.
What's happening here has much more to do than even the appointment of a Supreme Court justice.
It really does.
You could be somebody that was perfect your entire life and somebody could accuse you of something.
Doesn't necessarily have to be a woman, as everybody says, but somebody could accuse you of something and you're automatically guilty.
But in this realm, you are truly guilty until proven innocent.
That's one of the very, very bad things that's taking place right now.
So this woman, and I'm sorry, I could not find her name, but she put out this satirical song about this, about how, oh yes, men have it so tough, and it's such a scary time for men.
Here's the song: I can't walk to my car late at night while on the phone.
I can't open up my windows when I'm home alone.
I can't go to the bar without a chaperone.
I can't wear a mini skirt if it's the only one I own.
I can't use public transportation after 7 p.m.
I can't be brutally honest when you slide into my DMs.
I can't go to the club just to dance with my friends.
And I can never leave my drink unattended.
But it sure is scary time for boys.
Yeah, gentlemen, band together, make some noise.
It's really tough when your reputation's on the line.
And any woman you've assaulted could turn up anytime.
Yeah, it's sure it's scary time for guys.
Can't speak to any woman or look her in the eyes.
So confusing, is it rape or is it just being nice?
So inconvenient that you even have to think twice.
Now, a lot of people on the right attack this song saying, oh, you know, you live in a free country.
You can do any one of these things.
But I don't think that's quite fair.
She's talking about the fact that women have to be more careful than men in a lot of situations.
That just the ordinary life of a woman is a life lived on guard to some degree.
And, you know, I have total sympathy with that.
The problem with it is, the problem with it is not that.
It's that she is blaming and the left is blaming men.
How would it be if knowing that I walk through a black neighborhood, a bad black neighborhood, I know I'm more likely to get mugged and I get mugged in that neighborhood.
And then I say, well, this shows you something about black people.
No, it shows you something about that neighborhood and about the culture of that neighborhood and about the culture of poverty and whatever is going on in that neighborhood.
And maybe it shows you something about black culture.
You could even say that.
But does it show you something about black people?
No, that's the kind of generality that the left, that identity politics is peddling to everybody.
So she's talking about men, but if she's not talking about the majority of men who would run to her defense, she's talking about the bad guys, basically.
The reason she can't live in an apartment on the ground floor is because of bad guys.
Blaming Identity Groups00:01:28
Not going to, because of me, it's not because of you.
It's because of somebody who might come in.
And that is what they're selling.
That is the whole thing they're selling.
They're selling bigotry.
They're selling racism.
They're selling sexism while slinging those slurs at us.
Everybody's got problems.
And girls have problems that are for girls, and boys have problems that are for boys.
I think boys suffer from crime a lot more than girls do, actually, you know, because the person most likely to get murdered, I think, is a young man who is within the vicinity of a gang.
So there's all kinds of problems.
The world is tough.
The world is tough.
But blaming identity groups, blaming identity groups is precisely not the way forward.
And while the left continually accuses the right of doing it, it's all happening on the left.
All right, that's it for me.
I'm not going to be on tomorrow.
I will be back on Thursday and have an extra show on Friday to make up for the Wednesday gap.
So you will have a Clavenless Wednesday, but I'll be back on Thursday.
I hope you will be too.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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