Moscow Mules: Trump. Nato. Putin. MAGA Mike. Tucker Gets Tuckered.
Brad and Dan begin by discussing Trump's comments on NATO and how they reflect eight years of Putin transforming the American Right's view of America's role in the world. This leads to an extended discussion of Mike Johnson and his reticence to send support to Ukraine without a border deal, even though that is what the Senate sent him. Democrats turned the table, perhaps, on the immigration issue - but at a cost. Then there is Tucker Carlson, parading around Moscow . . .
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Joined today, early morning for me.
Still getting my eyes open here with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
It's funny, there are times when living on the East Coast is nice.
Like, you know, it's later in the morning for me, normal time.
You're up at like, you know, pre-dawn, but For those of us who, you know, have our early bird special at 5 and go to bed like 7.30, primetime TV and shows are just out for me.
It's just past my bedtime.
I am, yeah, if you let me, I will be a, like, I'll stay up way too late kind of person.
You know what I mean?
But, anyway.
All right, we need to talk about basically all things Russia today, which is weird, but that's going to include Donald Trump.
It's going to include the United States Congress, which is turning out to be a do-nothing Congress, which is a term you hear sometimes.
We'll talk about Tucker Carlson's foray into Moscow and his interview with Putin.
Uh, Deanna, just real quick, like, have you watched the, the footage of, of Tucker, like not interviewing Putin, but like cruising around Moscow?
Like, like he went to what looks like an Aldi supermarket and he's like amazed because he, he puts in 10 rubles to the cart and it gives him a cart.
And then he, if you return the cart, you get your 10 rubles back.
And he looks into the camera and he makes these comments like, wow, you know, this is really ingenious because.
This incentivizes you to bring your cart back and not take it to your homeless encampment.
He says that, those words.
And he looks like somebody out of ... He looks like a rich kid who's never visited a supermarket, especially in Europe.
Because he's a rich kid who's never visited a supermarket.
Like, have you ever been to ... Almost every European country I've ever been to has, you An Aldi, where you pay your 10 Euro cents.
Or every airport that does that with the luggage carts.
I mean, yeah.
Whatever, yeah.
I'll tell you what it reminds me of.
Years ago, when Mitt Romney was running for president, and he was talking about NASCAR, and he's like, yeah, I love NASCAR.
One of my best friends is a NASCAR owner.
Or when they would ask rich candidates how much a gallon of milk costs.
And of course, they have no idea, because they haven't set foot in a grocery store Some of them probably in their life a lot of them certainly in their adult lives and like just that out of touch and that's that's like the the the wannabe elitist populism of somebody like Tucker Carlson who's like I'm the voice of the regular true American whatever but like
Whoa, who knew that you could, you know, do this thing with carts or, you know, yeah, just whatever, like these, these earth shattering things that you're like, uh, yeah, that's a thing we all know about.
He goes to the, he goes to the subway and he's like so amazed how clean it is.
Anyway, we'll say, I just, yeah.
I just, you were saying before we recorded how annoying Tucker Carlson, it's not just that I don't enjoy his politics or anything he does, it's like as a human, he just looks like the most out of touch, like, you know, trust fund kid you've ever met who's just never done anything in the real world and is amazed when he like sort of, you know, Like, how much could a banana cost, Michael?
$5?
Anyway, it's like that whole meme.
Anyway.
He's also, just the last point I'll make about this, because you've got the trust fund people of the world, and you've got the ones who can basically pass as a regular person.
You got the ones who can't, and know they can't, and don't want to, and wouldn't deign to, like, look like the rest of us.
And then you got the truck- Tucker- Trucker?
Tucker Carlsons.
There's gotta be some joke in there somewhere.
The Tucker Carlsons who, like, don't, and are incredibly insecure by the fact that they can't pass as, like, a regular bro.
And so they try really hard, and the desperation just oozes out, and it's painful to watch.
That's a good analysis.
We met some of those Just Fun folks in Oxford.
Anyway, like the first time, and it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter, Dan.
I have so many thoughts this morning, partially because I just woke up.
All right, take it away before I just meander into something that I need to be talking about.
By now, everybody knows Trump made some comments about NATO and Russia, so that's all out there in the ether, but we want to break that down and talk about why it matters and connect it all back to our Congress, connect it back to our culture, connect it back to the election.
There's a lot to talk about today.
It feels like today's a headline news, national news day in terms of what we're going to discuss.
Yeah, so just to give some background and, you know, summarize what, as you say, a lot of people know.
Trump, this week, he made big news when he basically seemed to encourage Russia to attack NATO allies who, as he says, don't pay.
And what he's talking about is this sort of agreement that NATO members are supposed to, what was it, 2% of their GDP toward defense or something like that, and most countries don't hit that mark.
The U.S.
has long been the biggest spender into that and sort of shouldered most of the financial burden of NATO.
I also want to point out that that's by design that's strategic on the part of the U.S.
because part of the reason why the U.S.
gets to sort of be the center of gravity in something like NATO is that it does take on those responsibilities.
That's something that talked about for years.
I think Trump doesn't understand that, but Whatever.
So this week, he's at a campaign stop in South Carolina, really trying to make noise and trying to be visible because, of course, that's where Nikki Haley is from.
So he said this.
He said, On the campaign stop, he said, one of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, well, sir, if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us?
First, I just want to pause.
Like, this is one of those things you're like, who?
Like, who's, who's the president of the big country?
What European leader said, if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia?
Like, nobody, nobody phrased it that way.
Whatever.
Anyway, it's the, it's the, like, it's the Trump.
A lot of people say, a lot of people tell me, you know, whatever.
Well, sir, if we don't pay and we're attacked by Russia, will you protect us?
I said, says Trump, you didn't pay?
You're delinquent?
Yeah, let's say that happened.
No, I would not protect you.
In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.
And of course, his crowd loves it and cheers and all of this other stuff.
But everybody who supports NATO is shocked by this.
I'm maybe not shocked.
I'm not surprised that Trump said something, but outraged by this, the Biden administration and others, members of the GOP and the Trump campaign have tried to downplay these remarks.
They immediately go into like spin mode and trying to downplay this.
Some just said he's unlikely to actually follow through with this threat.
They're kind of like, you know, he's not really going to do that.
Others reiterated the old line that we just shouldn't take what Trump says literally.
So, for example, Marco Rubio said, quote, he doesn't talk like a traditional politician.
This is on CNN's State of the Union.
We've already been through this.
You think people would have figured it out.
So he's like, you would think all you mainstream people would figure out that Trump doesn't mean what he says.
Marco?
You're right, buddy.
We've been through this.
It's been eight years, Marco.
We think we would have figured it out.
You're exactly right.
You just don't know it.
Okay, thanks, Dan.
I just had to say that to Marco, who is probably listening.
Okay, go ahead.
Yeah, I'm sure.
He's an avid listener.
I think he's subscribed twice.
A foreign policy analyst, quote, close to Trump, anonymous said, quote, Why the media takes these off-the-cuff comments so serious is beyond me.
Trump says one thing and does another.
He was at a rally and it's meant for right-wing outlets like One America Network.
Don't pay attention to them.
Again, you're right.
It was aimed totally at One America Network and that kind of thing.
But this is the line.
Don't take him seriously.
He didn't mean it.
It indicates, as a lot of people have noted, that even people on the far right know that this is a terrible idea, that actually blowing up NATO or leaving NATO or not responding to American NATO obligations, whatever, that this would be a huge mistake.
But for those who are busy saying, she didn't mean it, it's an off-the-cuff comment, just let it go.
Trump doubles down later this week at another rally.
He said again, he says, I've been saying, look, if they're not going to pay, we're not going to protect, okay?
And Biden, who said, oh, this is so bad.
This is so terrible that he would say that.
No, this is what he said to Trump at a rally.
He said nobody's paying their bills, reiterates the whole sort of thing.
So this this is the big the big brouhaha this week with Trump and NATO.
A couple of takeaways from this is, number one, I think it's interesting that the focus is Russia.
I think that's a telling point.
It's not a generic, if a NATO country is attacked, would we help them?
It's about Russia.
And we know that Trump has this kind of bromance thing with Putin, I think an envy.
I think that what Putin has, the political setup Putin has in Russia, is what Trump wants in the U.S.
It's what he's been arguing in court.
The unified executive theory that you've talked about so much, these radical claims that the president is literally immune from prosecution for doing anything in office.
These are what he's been arguing for.
I think it's also interesting when supporters of Trump tell us how selective they are and when we should listen to Trump and when we shouldn't.
As you say, we've been hearing this a long time, almost a decade now, of them playing off things that he says, don't take it seriously, he doesn't mean it.
But he means what he says about the border, or he means what he says when he says the election was stolen, or he means what he says when he says that he's going to turn around the economy, or whatever it is.
The selectivity of when we dismiss him as off-the-cuff and not literal and when we don't.
Or if Trump was in office, he would have never let this happen.
Biden is weak.
You know, if Trump was in office, Putin would have never done this or that would have never happened there.
And it's like, so in one moment, you want me to laugh him off as he's not a serious person.
But in another moment, you want me to believe he's the toughest, most stern, most intimidating figure in politics today.
Like, it's ridiculous.
Yeah.
And another piece of this is the constant blaming the media rather than Trump.
None of them are like, yeah, he shouldn't have said that.
That was a terrible thing to say.
This would be a terrible idea.
And of course, there were people who said that too.
But you get the others who are like, this is an off-the-cuff comment.
It's just political rhetoric.
I can't believe you media people haven't figured this out.
It's like, to me, the family, you get together for the holidays, and you've got the person who drinks too much.
Somebody says the wrong thing and sets them off and they just blow up the whole meal.
And the family gets pissed at the person who said something instead of the person who drank too much and lost their temper and blew up the meal.
There's that piece of it.
And the last thing I want to do here is just to tie this in again with the Russia connection.
Because also this week, Putin says that a Biden presidency would be better for Russia than a Trump presidency.
So Trump is busy saying if Russia attacks NATO allies, we're not going to protect them and so forth.
In the meantime, Putin says, you know what, it'd be better if Biden won.
He said that Biden was more predictable and experienced.
I think he meant as sort of a politician, statesperson, whatever.
And so, what's going on here?
And I had people who, I had students actually this week who asked me, they're like, you know, Trump just said that, like, he's not really going to check Russian aggression and then, like, Putin comes out and says, I don't think it'd be great if Biden was president.
Like, what's going on?
And my read on this, I'm interested in your read and how this ties together with all of this, is this is Putin basically throwing a line at Trump.
Because what this does now is that while Trump is busy fantasizing about being the American Putin, He and the MAGA crowd can say, see, we're the really tough ones.
We're the ones that Putin's afraid of.
We're the ones who are going to go after Russia.
So when I'm saying all this stuff about NATO, Putin knows that we would go after him.
He knows that we would do this.
And so while all of this is going on, you've got this kind of this weird disinformation kind of thing coming in both directions with Putin helping Trump by saying that Biden would be basically soft on Putin, I think is what the line is.
So all of this going on this week with Trump and Putin and NATO and the ever-present reality of Russia hovering over American electoral politics all over again.
So I know you've got a lot of thoughts on this.
Where are you at with that?
What are you thinking?
Well, so I think a couple things, three levels on this.
Let's just take the... I just want to remind everyone, I know everyone listening realizes this, but I do think it's worth kind of talking about today a little bit, which is Why do we have NATO?
Why does all of this exist?
Let's just do a very basic kind of rundown of what happened here.
What happened here is, in the middle of the 20th century, Dan, there was a world war.
And the world war was overwhelmingly destructive and hurtful to so many people.
There was the Holocaust, There was how many lives lost in World War II from all sides, from how many countries.
It spanned the Pacific theater.
Uh, you know, we can talk about everything from like Oceania to the Pacific theater, Eastern Asia, Southeast Asia.
We can talk about people and people don't sort of take notice of this sometimes that World War II was about places like Germany and Poland and France and England.
Yes.
But like, it was also about places like Denmark.
Going all the way north into Scandinavia, like all the way into Italy, all the way... I mean, this is a true world war.
Africa, yeah.
The African continent, what's the point?
After that there emerged a vision for the world.
Hey, should we have people who support democracy or those who support authoritarianism?
And authoritarianism sometimes wrapped in the flag of communism, okay?
All of that is sort of the history that I think some of us at least keep in our minds and understand.
But this is where the idea of NATO comes, that if you're going to have a Soviet Union that has nuclear capabilities, and if there are threats that the Soviet Union would be aggressive in overtaking those countries, threatening those countries, Like Germany did before, then there needs to be an alliance of folks.
I don't know, people, we watch superhero movies?
I don't actually, I don't, but I know that there are like 70 to 80 superhero movies right now that people watch.
I don't know any of the Spider, I don't know what DC, Marvel, Spider-Man, I don't know, you know, stick it in your Harry Potter.
I have no idea, okay?
But like, that was like the oldest thing I've ever said, Dan.
Dan, did you just hear what I said?
Did you hear that?
Yes, I did.
Wow.
It kind of made my day, actually.
I'm probably going to take this piece of the recording, and I'm going to make it my ringtone.
And it's going to be Brad Onishi, who's like, well, I don't, but I could watch superhero movies.
It doesn't matter.
Here's my point.
My understanding is in superhero movies, people make alliances.
You watch Survivor, you make a pact.
This is what this is.
And so over the course of the last 60 years, and I want to read something from a piece of time by Jake Steckler, who's a military person.
This is a military vet, somebody who's very familiar with the U.S.
Armed Services, okay?
After World War II, America emerged as the world's premier superpower.
We had this goal and this idea that we had a moral imperative to be on a city on a hill to prevent fascism from consuming the world.
I would add communism in any form of authoritarianism.
And this ideal of America as a city on a hill and a superpower is, and he says this in the piece, it is misguided in many ways.
It is hurtful.
This American exceptionalism is a problem.
I don't think that I don't understand that.
I do.
As somebody who has lived overseas and dealt with the perceptions of Americans and knows how much of the world thinks of us, I understand that this idea is thoroughly flawed.
And there's been all of these geopolitical efforts we've made, Sheckler says, over the decades.
And Vietnam, the Vietnam War, right?
A grand, misguided American undertaking.
Yes.
Other places.
Afghanistan, we could talk about in our lifetime, Dan.
But what we have right now, and I agree with this paragraph right here, okay?
In the Ukraine-Russia conflict, is we have, okay?
A situation that seems pretty clear cut if you go back to World War II and the creation of NATO, the prevention of the spread of communism and fascism.
The war in Ukraine is different.
It's different than Vietnam.
It's different than Afghanistan.
An outright evil Russian conquest has killed tens of thousands as Moscow seeks to dismantle democracy and reassume hegemonic control of its neighbor.
Ukraine isn't asking for manpower, just the means to fully repel an invasion that has captured nearly 20% of its land.
So what's happening with the Ukraine-Russia conflict seems to be a very clear cut situation where you would have imagined a year and a half, two years ago when it all began, that it would have been this sort of Captain America situation of this is why we, this is the raison d'etre.
This is the reason to jump in and be the superpower and whatever America has always thought it's been.
And yet here we have, and I just want to read a statement from Tommy Tuberville, Senator from Alabama.
Tuberville says, we forced this issue.
We kept forcing NATO all the way to Eastern Europe and Putin just got tired of it.
He said, listen, I do not want missiles on my border from the United States of America.
It'd be like Russia coming to Mexico and putting missiles in Mexico.
I can understand what he's talking about.
So, like, really, Senator?
Like, really, Coach?
Like, you don't... I don't know.
You're in the upper chamber of Congress.
You don't want to talk?
About like the history that I just outlined in the most bare terms, the history of like a Cold War, of a nuclear disarmament, a history of, you know, the Soviet Union and all of the various ways.
You're telling me that because NATO has existed for decades and decades, Putin had to invade Ukraine.
It's exactly what you just said, Dan, about like, oh, why did you get Tommy mad?
You know, he drinks too much and he just destroyed Thanksgiving dinner.
It's your fault, Susie.
But Tommy Tuberville is basically at this point repeating Russian propaganda.
And this is the second point I want to make, and I promise I'll shut up, OK?
What does Trump get?
I'm sorry, what does Putin get with Trump?
Like Timothy Snyder, the historian and chronicler of fascism and other aspects of authoritarian history, on Twitter this week had a great thread and was like, here's 50 examples from his book, The Road to Unfreedom, of the ways that Trump Oh, it's Putin.
And so I'm totally in agreement with Snyder.
Snyder has chronicled these.
I'm not going to do a whole Russiagate thing.
But there's just like real on the record evidence of like what Putin has done for 40 years to court Trump and the ways that Trump financially and politically is indebted to him.
But I think there's something more at play, Dan, that I don't want to miss.
What I don't want to miss is that what Putin gets with Trump is an American president Who has shaped the entire Republican Party, which we'll talk about in a second.
People like Tommy Tuberville.
And they now have adopted Putin's ideal of governance.
You said it so perfectly.
Trump has this Putin fantasy.
Like, I don't think that when Trump says things like NATO, he strategically was like, okay, Vladimir sent me an email.
He said, I have to say this now because I owe him $50 million or he has the P tape or something.
I don't think that's the calculation, Dan.
I think it is.
He's a useful idiot who's been courted and he now wants to be Putin.
Like, as you said, there's this envy.
I want presidential immunity.
I want to exist in a way where there's impunity for me as president.
I want to rule without having to deal with courts and processes and the deep state.
I want to be Putin.
I want to do whatever I want.
Alexander Navalny is dead.
We learned that today.
Political dissident.
That's the kind of power and evil you can do if you're Putin.
Here's my point, Dan.
Putin gets an American political party that no longer believes in the let's protect democracy around the world.
Let's enter into an alliance and a coalition with other democracies and make sure that the world is full of democracy.
Let's make sure the world is moving towards something that is not fascism, as flawed as the EU is, as flawed as whatever country you want to point out.
You get someone like Trump adopting a worldview that says, it's just about America and that's it.
I don't care.
I don't care about anything else.
And you get so many of the Republicans on Twitter saying, and we'll get to this with Congress, well, if you don't protect American borders, how can you protect Ukrainian ones?
And you just reduce the world, Dan, to like, This is just about me and my kids.
You want to get out here and make me pay taxes to pave the roads?
I don't understand that.
Unless you're talking to me about protecting my own family, then I don't want to hear it.
And it's this short-sighted, war-of-the-worlds vision of governance.
That's what Putin gets, is eight years of Trump shaping the Republican Party into Tommy Tubervilles and Mike Johnson's And the rest of them who are now seeing the world through Putin's eyes and thinking, that's how we should do governing.
That's so don't get me wrong.
I agree with Timothy Snyder.
Trump is an asset.
Fine.
But there's more here at play.
It goes back to the book burning from last week.
And the idea that you burn a book?
Well you know what's so much more powerful and you know who knows this is Putin?
Is put ideas in people's heads and let them grow and then eight years later of Trump you have a whole Republican Party that thinks Putin is the good guy here and that is an astounding astounding turn of events in American history.
So just a couple of points to add to that.
So everything you say about NATO is right.
But let's imagine that somebody is not even buying into the ideals of NATO.
It's just about naked American advantage.
We need to do what's best for America.
And like, you've still got the argument for NATO.
And that's the point that I was making too about the money.
Like, there have always been those who... Because we know that whole history that you're talking about of propping up authoritarian regimes and so forth in the name of American democracy and all those contradictions.
How are those justified?
You would always have those who say, well, this has to be about American strategic advantage.
So if we are the center of gravity in NATO, like, yeah, everybody should be paying their 2%, but 2% for the US is already a lot more money than it is going to be for any other NATO member.
But if they're paying less, we know that that lets you call the shots.
It's like the UK was in the European Union and then they figured out when they left it that, oh hey, guess what?
Nobody in the EU kind of listens to us anymore because we're not a member.
There was a sense where, strategically, you didn't want to just be transactional about this.
Like, you didn't want to press the, you need to pay or you're out.
It would be more of the, hey, you know what, we get it, it's hard, but don't worry, we've got your back.
And by the way, it means we're kind of calling the shots.
That was the GOP that I grew up hearing, was the sort of NATO at all costs, American advantage, militarism, and so forth.
And I'm not pining for militarism, But to just put it into perspective, you're saying the shift in the rhetoric of the GOP to being sort of pro-Russian, our model now is Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin has been living rent-free in Trump's head for a really, really long time.
And he now is, as you say, driving the GOP.
It's worth remembering that this is a former KGB guy.
Who is really, really good at disinformation and psychological operations and all of this.
And he's been pulling this, as you say, on the GOP now for years.
And it is.
It's a really, really stunning reversal.
And, you know, we've talked about this for years, growing up hearing that the Soviet Union and the Russians were You know, the end times stuff, that this was the apocalyptic end, that this was the enemy of all enemies, to where now you have, you know, central figures in the GOP, or people who want to be central figures in the case of Tubby, saying, you know, maybe, poor Putin, You know, God, NATO's too close to him.
I understand that.
You got to have some elbow room.
You got to feel safe.
I think the reversal is stunning.
And I think it also, you know, just even for those with, like I say, a more real politic, NATO was always about strategic advantage.
Don't really worry about the ideals.
And, you know, even then there was a strong argument for NATO.
So it just shows the distance that we've come.
I want to just make one more point.
We'll go to break.
Heather Cox Richardson tweeted this week, Why is no one making the connection between Trump's plan to attack Mexico and his support for Putin's invasion of Ukraine?
Doesn't he need to destroy the rules-based international order that protects national sovereignty in order to make his Mexico plan work?
And again, I just think that there's something not to miss here with what Trump's doing.
It's not just, hey, Putin has evidence against me.
I better keep him happy.
I just I really don't think that's the calculation.
I think the calculation is more.
This is how I want, I want to be, I want to bring Putin home and I want to be him.
So we've established that today.
But by saying that Putin has the right to attack and invade a neighboring country because they got too close, it's like I'm, I'm, my fist is moving through the air and if it happens to hit your face then that's your problem.
What does that do?
Well, it means that the U.S.
can then adopt a vision that says, yeah, it's us against everyone.
So if we want to go into Mexico, and Trump has talked about this, and get those drug cartels or do something to stop what they think, you know, what white Nationalists are calling the replacement of white people by people coming over the border, then we'll do that.
I mean, I think Heather Cox Richardson is pointing something out here, is that if you abandon NATO in one step and you tell your electorate that that's how you should operate, then you're priming them for you to say, hey, guess what?
We're going to Mexico and we're going to do this, this, and this.
And everyone's like, well, what about like international law?
What about, you know, the ways that that would just trigger like so many things across the world and set a precedent and lost lives?
And it's like, well, that's what we got to do.
They're getting too close or they won't cooperate.
So we just attack.
There's just this there's a move from a conceptual to a to an applicable.
And I don't think we should miss that either in all of this.
So.
All right.
Any final thoughts, Dan, on this?
Just the final one to tie all that together when you talk about the calculation.
It's what Putin has done is created envy.
That's the leverage he has on Trump.
Trump envies Putin, wants to be Putin.
I think that that's so much more powerful and significant and provocative with a person like Trump than some sort of overt threat.
I think those things might exist, and they're in the background, but I think that's the issue.
He has become the exemplar of what Trump wants to be, and we know what Trump is like when he wants something.
He does everything he can to try to get it, and that's what Putin is for him.
All right, let's take a break.
We'll come back and see what this all means back in our United States Congress.
Be back in a second.
Okay, Dan, so we talked about this, I think, in broad terms last week.
I think it's worth going through it in a little more detail this week, and that is the sort of back and forth between the Senate and the House debating aid for Ukraine and other foreign entities like Israel and Taiwan, but tying that to border security.
I know some of you out there have followed this, and you're very much up on the details.
Others of you have probably heard fragments of it, and you're like, I don't understand exactly what's happening, and what is Mike Johnson doing now?
So let me try to break a little bit of that down and then roll it all into what we just talked about as stuff that is related to a worldview, a governance philosophy, and just Russia, Putin, Trump.
Okay?
It all connects.
So here's Greg Sargent, who now writes at the New Republic.
House Speaker Mike Johnson's reaction to the announcement of a deal late Sunday from a bipartisan group of senators was particularly telling.
The bill, Johnson said, is dead on arrival in the House because it won't come close to ending the border catastrophe the president has created.
In saying this, Johnson exposed the real GOP calculation.
If the bill passes, Biden might no longer fully own what happens at the border.
Republicans will have participated in passing a solution.
An actual solution, Dan.
Making it harder for them to blame Biden for it.
That's plainly why Donald Trump keeps urging Republicans to kill the bill.
The bill would, in fact, do a great deal that Republicans say they want.
It would make it significantly harder to qualify for asylum, and it would channel major new expenditures into border security, expand the detention of migrants, and expedite the processing of asylum claims, reducing backlogs in migrant processing, including faster removals of those who don't qualify.
So we mentioned this last week.
I think you and I are not fans of all of those things.
There's a lot to talk about there that we're not going to just dig into today, but just get that on the record.
But two, here's what happens, Dan, is the Senate passes a bill that has two things that are a part of it.
It has aid for Ukraine, $60 billion.
It also has aid for Israel and aid for Taiwan.
Okay.
The bill also includes all that stuff I just mentioned about the border.
So it's basically like the Senate, and this was all negotiated over months, like going back to like Thanksgiving.
Chris Murphy and Kirsten Sinema and James Lankford all kind of worked this out in a Democrat, Republican, independent way.
This bill ties together All this new stuff for the southern border in the United States with the Ukraine aid.
So Mike Johnson, after months of this working this stuff out, says we're not even going to look at it, it's dead on arrival, sorry.
And people like Greg Sargent and others are like, okay, because this actually does a lot of the stuff you guys are always asking to do.
Why are you rejecting it like without even voting on it, considering it, nobody wants to debate it, you just, it's not even a thing?
And I think Sargent and many others have pointed this out, rightly, is like, because if they actually passed it, that would be a solution.
Trump can't run on it.
Trump can't just get on Fox News and, and not Trump, but all of his lackeys and everyone else on the TV all day every day and talk about the border crisis.
We went through all this last week.
Okay.
So what happens is the Senate then splits up the bills.
So the Senate now is sending the House a bill for aid to Ukraine and Taiwan and Israel and then the border stuff is all separate.
And now Mike Johnson's saying, I can't vote for, uh, I can't bring this to the, to the floor for a vote because it doesn't include anything on the border.
And everyone's looking around like, wait, yeah, we sent, what?
We sent you that last week.
We sent you that and you said it was dead on arrival.
So.
You know, what do you want us to do, right?
I mean, you have senators like Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi.
She voted against the Ukraine aid bill, saying she can't support it without protecting our border security.
But last week, she voted against the combined Ukraine aid border security package, saying it gave Biden campaign material.
That's a tweet from Ashton Pittman, who covers Mississippi.
That's the exact...
That's the whole game.
Okay.
All right.
So what are some takeaways here and what are some things that I just, I want to try to kind of talk about?
Number one, we, we, we, we mentioned this all last week, but this really does expose the Republican Party and they're kind of one of the pillars of their, of their whole campaign for 2024 and everything that they hate the Democrats for.
And that is border security.
And it's starting to look like they are just a do-nothing part, a do-nothing Congress, do-nothing Republican caucus.
Because when you present them with really, with measures that they have declared they want, they won't even look at it.
And then when you split up the bills, they won't even look at it because they don't include the border stuff.
And everyone's just looking around like... It's like my two-year-old asking me for cheese, and then I gave her the cheese, but I didn't... I didn't give her the cheese on the right plate.
And she's like, I won't even look at the cheese.
Y'all ever had a two-year-old?
It's so fun.
Like, she's like, I won't even look at that.
She's yelling at me, like, I'm not even gonna... How dare you expect me to even look at that cheese, and much less eat it, if it's not on the blue plate?
And then I go get the blue plate, and she looks at me, and she throws, like, right dead in the eye, throws the blue plate on the ground, and you're just like...
Of all the enemies I've had in the world, none of them would just look me in the eye like that and throw the plate on the ground.
It's you, the love of my life, my two-year-old, doing it.
So, when you deliver all of this to the Republicans in Congress, in the House, that's how they act.
Okay.
So, number one, Schumer called their bluff.
Like if you read the kind of oral histories of this, at least according to Schumer, so I'll just put that out there, but the Democrats sort of a couple months ago said to themselves, all right, what if we actually work out a really negotiated border deal?
Something that actually gives them 75% of they want.
What's going to happen?
Well, the calculation was they're going to do what they're doing now.
They're going to reject it.
They're going to say, nope, sorry.
We don't actually want, what was the word I used earlier?
A solution.
So in one sense, I don't like the content of the bill.
I don't like this whole way of approaching the border.
On the other hand, What Schumer did tactically was expose them, right, as they're never going to do anything to solve anything because they need crisis to actually win.
Now, some of this came into full relief this week in the special election to replace George Santos.
George Santos was expelled from Congress.
There was an election.
And Tom Swozy won, the Democrat, and he won handily.
He won by By eight points.
And he did so in some sense by running on things like the border.
Basically saying they don't want to do anything.
They don't want to fix anything.
They don't want to help anybody.
And so you should probably vote for me because we're actually trying to get things done.
So there was a tangible kind of outcome this week where people were pointing to that election, that special election in New York District 3 and saying, this might be a kind of like, you know, thing to look out for as we think about what's going to happen in November and So on and so forth.
Now, there's a whole bit about Ukraine and Putin and NATO I want to talk about, but I'll throw it to you to get some initial thoughts just about the back and forth in the houses of Congress and what's going on with Mike Johnson, so on and so forth.
Yeah, so, I mean, first there's a really good breakdown of how that all works.
And I think, I think, here's the thing, and this is something we talk about a lot.
It's something I talk about a lot in, you know, it's in the code as well.
And I know we engage with people about this.
When they're like, when you spell it out like that, because it can be hard to follow.
Most of us are doing stuff besides like, you know, watching C-SPAN or reading congressional tweets or X's or whatever they're called now.
Or, you know, whatever else.
We're doing other things.
And so when you piece it together like that, and so thanks to you and other people, journalists and others who've done this and sort of put this all out, you see it in stark relief, the fact that there is no coherent rationale for this.
You make demands.
We meet your demands.
You say, no, no, no.
We didn't like it that way.
Send it back to the kitchen.
We didn't like this.
This isn't the way it is.
You reconfigure it, send it back.
And now you say, hey, this isn't what you sent us before.
We don't like it.
And people say, well, that's incoherent.
And yes, it is.
I think what you're getting at and what I'm trying to emphasize all the time is when we see that something's incoherent and it still sort of persists, The next question should be, okay, so what's the real issue?
And I think too many people, too many just regular people, a big we, lots of us, certainly lots of journalists and others, we stay at that level of what they say and what they say they want and political doctrine and so forth.
And we get to that point where we're just baffled by why is this, why this is so incoherent.
What can this possibly be about?
And I think it's important to look at, so what's really going on?
And that's where you get to, they need the crisis.
They need a lack of solutions.
Solutions will, in their view, disadvantage them.
I also think this is a weird calculation.
I, for the life of me, do not understand how Trump engenders such loyalty in people When everybody knows that he has no loyalty to anybody, because I think this could endanger some of those congressional Republicans come election time.
And yeah, maybe it'll help Trump, but it might disadvantage them.
And yet, so there's that.
But I think that that's the issue, is to understand, as we talk about so often, how much politics is about emotion, how much politics is about deeply felt senses of like, you know, who the real Americans are, who is deserving of protection, who isn't, who, you know, and with Trump, this notion of who gets the credit and who doesn't, and so on.
I think that that's the piece, is because there will be those that will say, okay, so like, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats, if we accept this line of reasoning, and I think it's plausible, Call their bluff, put these things forward, or basically like, let's give you what you say you want and it didn't turn into anything.
And people will be like, well, what's the benefit of that?
Or they'll ask me, and I know they ask you too.
If it's not about the reasons that people give, What's the point of underlying all those reasons?
And I think what it does is it allows us to sort of clear the space and say, OK, let's look at what's really going on.
Here it is.
Don't tell us it's about the border when you didn't like negotiate this or send it back and say, here's some additional demands we have or, you know, something not even pretending.
It's just, no, no, we're not going to look.
I'm not going to look right.
You gave me the cheese on the plate and I'm the two year old now, like staring at the ceiling or something and refusing to acknowledge it.
Or if you've ever tried to give, this is my experience, try to give a dog like medicine or something and it's like its head, it keeps like moving its head around and won't look at you and you're like, come on, just like hold still.
That's the reaction.
I think this highlights what's really at play there.
And I think that the last point I'll make here is I would go beyond, it's even beyond a do nothing Congress to a block anything.
Congress.
It's even more active.
Doing nothing makes it sound like we're just not going to take action on something.
We're not going to actively work to do something.
Active obstruction of bills that are put forward.
We saw this in the House already last week, and you've got some House Republicans who are really frustrated about this.
We see it coming from the Senate this week.
It has escalated to just a very naked, like, we're going to undermine anything actively for the sake of helping Trump and creating the sense of crisis that he needs in his work to regain power and authority.
There's a very clear sense that if Mike Johnson brought the bill for aid to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel to the floor right now, it would pass.
That enough Republicans would vote for it that it would pass.
He just won't bring it.
Procedurally, he won't bring it to the floor so it's not being voted on.
Okay, so just real quick, I think, yes, Schumer and Murphy and those guys, they had a strategy of saying, all right, let's give them what they want in some case on the border.
Now, if you really want to dig into the details of the border provisions that are outlined, read Greg Sargent's piece at the New Republic.
He points out the things that he takes to be positive.
There are positive things in terms of like, Creating space for asylum seekers and and processing their claims in an expedited way and so on there's also things that are negative so there's more nuance here as always and if you want to dig into that go read Sargent's piece because he does a good job in my view at least of really breaking that down.
I want to just make one more sort of big picture point about where we are.
And we've been talking about it for all day.
Eight years of Trump.
Eight years of Trump.
And for Putin, that gives you eight years of just chipping away at the mindset, the worldview of the Republican Party, the American.
Dan, we're in a situation, let's just start with Mike Johnson.
Mike Johnson is MAGA Mike Johnson.
He's a true believer in Christian dominion.
He's a true believer in Donald Trump.
He tried to overturn the 2020 election any way possible.
He is tied to those who are January 6th.
This is a true believer.
There's a lot of murmuring from the Republican caucus this week about how he doesn't have a plan.
There's a lot of people unhappy he started.
There's a piece written at Politico that was like, Kevin McCarthy looks better than ever.
And it's always easier to sort of say, oh, I wish we had the previous guy.
Mike Johnson looks out of his depth.
And I'll just make a quick comparison.
It's not going to be to Kevin McCarthy.
I'll compare him to Paul Ryan.
I don't have any interest in Paul Ryan's ideology in terms of it resonating with my own.
Paul Ryan is reading over there, reading Ayn Rand, and he thinks, you know, government's the enemy and all that.
If y'all remember Paul Ryan from the Mitt Romney campaign and, you know, leader of the house and all that.
When you encounter Paul Ryan, you seem to encounter somebody who's incredibly reflective, has ideas, in my view the wrong ideas, and is trying to sort of implement those and has a strategy.
I would never characterize what I saw with Paul Ryan as like, this guy's out of his depth.
I'm not sure he's ready for this stage.
I'm not sure he's ready to be here.
But Dan, and here's the point I want to make.
When for eight years the criterion for being a Republican leader is loyalty to Trump, you're going to get Paul Ryan's quitting Congress.
You're going to get Mitt Romney saying, I'm out.
And you're going to get Mike Johnson's and Lauren Boebert's and Matt Gaetz and Comer And green and all of the lackeys.
There's so many articles out right now about the dozens of Republicans that are retiring from Congress this year.
All those moderate Republicans that people are always trying to tell you are still left, the ones who aren't Trumpist and far right, they're all retiring if they're still around.
Why?
Because the entire Republican Party is based on loyalty to Trump.
If you don't believe me, The RNC is trying to pick a new chair, and this week it came out that Lara Trump is going to be likely the co-chair.
And Lara Trump said this week that every dollar of the RNC should go to supporting Donald Trump, including paying his legal fees.
Like, do you know what kind... And Molly Jong Fast and Tim Miller did a good job of talking about this, so I want to credit them.
In a segment, I heard the two of them talking.
That is not how this is supposed to work.
You're not supposed to appoint your family members to be chair of the party when you're running to be the president.
Like, that is not...
That is just Banana Republic stuff.
And so, if you think that Mike Johnson being in this chair is an accident, it's not.
Yes, he was put there by the shadow network of Christian nationalists that we talk about all the time on here, the Council for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation.
They all love him.
But those groups are also, right, dedicated to Trump.
The white evangelical, the white Christian nationalists, the whole shadow network has succumbed to Trump loyalty.
Here's my point, Dan, is eight years later,
And I want to say this clearly, and if you don't take anything else away from today, I hope you take this away, is that if you are a wannabe Putin who wants total control, not only of your political party, but the entire nation, if you want absolute immunity, as you've argued in court, if you want a unified executive branch, if you're going to put in place Project 2025, having idiots in place at key cogs and hinges of the government is a feature, not a bug.
Because when it gets down to it, you'd rather have an idiot you can tell what to do than somebody competent with ideas and a backbone who will tell you no.
There were people in Trump term number one who told him no.
And they ended up leaving, they ended up getting fired, whatever.
What do you do for Trump number two, term number two?
You make sure you got people in place that are fully loyal and not competent enough to say no.
Like, the best example of this was Sean Spicer.
Remember Sean Spicer?
Remember just how out of depth he looked, Dan?
Like, he just did not look ready for that role.
I mean, it was just hard to watch, and the famous SNL skit with Melissa McCarthy being Sean Spicer, and just like, you know, he just looked like, bro, you're not ready to be here.
And we all know it.
You know what I mean?
We can make fun of that and laugh.
That is what you want at every level if you're Trump.
Not every level, but most levels, so that you can basically direct everybody.
I just want to say that MAGA Mike Johnson, if he looks like he's not ready for primetime, it's because he's not ready for primetime.
So, I got way more to say, but we're out of time.
Give me one more thought on this and then take us into Tucker being in Moscow.
Yeah, just a last thought is on this myth of the moderate core, that the true Republicans are still some moderate core that's there.
Even they don't believe this anymore.
So I just would love to quit reading op-eds or opinion pieces or something about how nobody's listening to the moderates.
You're right, nobody is, because they are not the core of the contemporary GOP.
And even they know they're not.
What is the evidence that the GOP is not a place where they can find a political identity anymore?
The fact that they're leaving Congress, the fact that they're leaving those offices.
So I think it just makes that point.
And I know I talk about that all the time, but it drives me crazy that we still kind of hear this myth.
So, Tucker Carlson in Russia, going back there, speaking of Putin, getting things that he wants.
So, Tucker Carlson, he traveled to Russia and interviewed, I'll put interviewed in quotes, Putin.
And ahead of time, he really tried to position himself as like this kind of hard-hitting real journalist who's brave enough and tough enough to talk to people like Putin.
And he said that the mainstream media refused to interview Putin and they wouldn't ask him tough questions and so forth.
Lots of members of media responded and were like, we've been trying to get Putin to sit down and do an interview for years.
He won't do it because we won't guarantee that we won't ask certain things or, you know, let him know ahead of time, you know, et cetera, right?
He can't control the interview or the narrative so they won't do it.
So Carlson goes over there.
You can tell us, you hinted at this earlier, gave a little snippet of it.
There are other pieces I'm sure you've got of Of Carlson, the frat boy bro, like cruising around Russia and so forth.
But to describe the interview as soft doesn't even come close.
These weren't like softball questions.
This is like T-ball questions.
We're just setting it up, these kind of nonsense questions and giving Putin everything he wants.
So Carlson goes there, gives Putin this super, super, super, super soft interview and so forth.
And then, and this is where it can make you laugh, but Putin is doing something real again.
What does Putin do?
He doesn't thank Carlson for the interview.
He doesn't pump Carlson up.
Instead, he mocks Carlson for the softball-weak nature of the interview.
He handpicks Carlson because he knows that he's a fanboy.
He knows that he's not going to ask anything difficult.
And then he mocks him for being exactly what he wanted him to be.
And so this is what Putin said, for example, he said he didn't get complete satisfaction from the interview.
He said, speaking on state TV, he also said that he thought Carlson was a dangerous person.
He thought he was a real journalist.
Quote, because I honestly thought he would be aggressive and ask so-called sharp questions.
And I wasn't just ready for that, I wanted it, because it would have given me the opportunity to respond sharply and kind, but he chose a different tactic.
So, he then mocks Carlson for giving him exactly the interview that he set him up to give, so that now Putin can try to position himself as, you know, I've got real answers, I'm ready, I'm ready to talk to the West, I'm ready to talk to Western media and defend myself and so forth.
But, you know, I guess they're just afraid of me.
I guess I'm just too tough, too manly, too everything else to be able to do that.
So, it was a classic rope-a-dope on Carlson who, like, feels like he scores this interview when, as you say, idiots, the Kremlin's like, this is our guy.
This is the person we're going to get to do this.
But what does it do?
It, again, if you're Putin, creates this myth of being tough, of being reasonable, that there's a reasonableness to what I'm doing.
This is exactly what Tuberville was saying.
Putin, I can imagine how he's feeling, right?
Why don't we just go over there and ask him?
It's just we won't go ask him what he's feeling.
And, you know, it plays into this.
So that was Carlson stumbling into this Putin trap.
But I think it's significant because it shows, again, the way that Putin is working, as you say, with the kind of idiots, pulling these strings of people who are easily manipulated to create a kind of mythos about who he is, what he is, the reasonableness of him, his toughness, etc., etc., etc., a brand that he's worked for years to create.
Think back to Putin on the horse and shirtless and all of that stuff.
I could talk a lot about Tucker Carlson, because who couldn't, but I'll throw it over to you for your sort of final thoughts or reflections on that.
So real quick, I agree with everything you said about the interview, and I have so many thoughts about the masculinity involved there, the ways that he intentionally is trying to make Tucker submit.
You can see Putin's whole worldview on display in the interview, because the whole thing is a power play.
It's just who wins.
And Tucker was not ready for that.
I mean, he looked, he just looked like somebody, again, like, he looked like Sean Spicer on day one.
But, in addition, there's all this footage of Tucker, like, going to the Moscow subway, and he's like, look how clean it is!
Compare this to New York City!
Look how, uh, there's, there's nice, there's things on the walls here that look nice, and He's in, like I said, he's in the shopping center and he's just like, wow, I'm amazed you put in 10 rubles and you get this cart.
This is who knew?
And it's, it's, it's really cringy.
And we can make fun of him for the next hour.
Here's the thing that I take away as we close today.
He is basically saying to his, his viewers.
Here's all the things that are better about this society than ours.
And he even says when he's outside the subway, I'm just asking the question, how come this subway is so much cleaner than ours?
How come there's no unhoused people here?
How come there's no rats?
He's saying things like that.
I'm just asking the question.
I'm not giving an answer.
By asking the question, he's giving his answer.
And this is how rhetoric works.
Asking the question in the way he does and then showing the footage of the subway station, he's like, we could have this too, just like Trump, if we had Putin.
If we had this way of living, where he will literally, if you're an immigrant, just either banish you to a camp or walk you out of the country, right?
If you're a Muslim, You may just not be allowed to exist in public.
If you are gay, same thing.
And if you speak up against the government, like Navalny did, 47-year-old man, announced today, political dissident, he's dead.
So, you know what?
I hear from Tucker.
I'm going to put into words the message she wanted his viewers to take away.
It might be worth having that kind of government that is that cruel to others, to queer folks, to dissidents, to people who commit minor crimes.
It might be worth having that if we could have this subway station.
Wouldn't that be better?
Wouldn't it be better to have a pure society, stripped of difference, stripped of dissidence, stripped of distinction, so we could have the Moscow subway station and this Aldi where I'm paying for my cart?
That's what he wants you to think.
Dan, eight years of Trump, eight years of fascination with authoritarianism, eight years of envying societies like Russia, and this is what you get.
Somebody like Carlson doing the Kremlin's bidding.
It's an American saying to Americans, Russian authoritarianism is better society than American society.
You would have never imagined that when Mitt Romney ran for president.
You would have just never thought that was ever possible.
All right.
Any final thoughts on that, and then what's your reasons for hope?
My final thought for that is cleanliness there is code for purity, right?
That's what he's asking.
Exactly.
Yes.
Oh, clean subway, clean streets, clean.
We don't mean clean, we mean pure.
Only the right kind of people have a place here, and that's the kind of America we want, right?
So, yeah.
I've also been to subway stations like that in countries that Carlson thinks are the, like, have you been to Copenhagen?
Same thing.
It looks that way.
Now, Socialist, high taxes, huge government infrastructure, social safety net.
That's Denmark.
That's how it looks there, too.
So anyway, whatever.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Sorry.
So my reason for hope, there's a guy who's kind of sticking with some of these themes.
There's a guy named Alexander Smirnoff, right?
Who is Alexander Smirnoff?
He is a former FBI informant, but he was charged this week with lying to the FBI about what he was the primary source about information or accusations about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and business dealings with Burisma and so forth.
The whole, the main basis that is given for the impeachment inquiry into Biden, he was charged this week with lying to the FBI.
The evidence that he had given was, or the testimony, was fabricated.
And I think, why do I see that as a reason of hope?
I don't think it's going to do away with an impeachment inquiry.
I'm not saying it because I think that Biden is a perfect guy.
I certainly think Hunter Biden is kind of a D-bag, you know, whatever.
But I think, again, it strips away the facade that the things that are going on in Congress targeting Biden are anything other than political theater to try to help Donald Trump.
So I saw that again of just exposing what it is that's really, really going on in Congress.
Well, he was supposed to be the smoking gun.
I mean, this was supposed to be the key witness and the whole thing, and he lied to the FBI.
Which, by the way, just don't do that.
If you ever have to interview the FBI, the pieces I've put together with my keen analytic abilities over time is that you shouldn't do that.
It has a bad end.
That's why people come here, Dan.
You can't get that on any other show.
That kind of advice.
All right.
So, my reason for hope is similar.
Dinesh D'Souza, right-wing troll, made a whole documentary about mules coming across the border.
That's what it's about.
And there's supposedly all this evidence of drug trafficking and people migrating over the southern border.
And, surprise surprise, when the folks who made that documentary and supposedly had all that evidence were called into court to prove and show that evidence, guess what they had?
Nothing.
And so, it's just one more, it's just one more example.
It's the exact same sort of situation that is the one you just described.
All right.
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Thanks, Brad.
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