Biden's State of the Union is widely panned as a disaster, and there's no question that it's one of the worst in recent memory. In this episode, we take a look at what went wrong, and why it happened. Plus, Jeremy Peters joins the show to talk about his thoughts on the speech.
00:01:54.760Let's stop seeing each other as enemies and start seeing each other for who we are, fellow Americans.
00:02:01.680So he doesn't talk to the American people writ large the same way he does when he is not on a big stage, right, for things like the State of the Union.
00:02:11.620And I think the American people know that.
00:02:14.020Look, joining me to break it all down for us, all angles on the State of the Union, we have Charles C.W. Cook with us today, senior writer at National Review.
00:02:20.920And Jeremy Peters joins the program for the first time, national political reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book, Insurgency, how Republicans lost their party and got everything they ever wanted.
00:03:37.660I likened it in the piece to David Bowie, who used to write down random lyrics on a piece of paper, cut them up, throw them up in the air and then reassemble them.
00:04:13.300I think it was the message that you would expect from the leader of a party that doesn't really have a coherent message to unify voters around going into this next midterm election and possibly even into 2024.
00:04:28.760It was a string of very vague utopian promises.
00:04:34.180We're going to end expensive prescription drugs.
00:04:45.620And it seemed that all of those promises, the president really couldn't back up with any specifics.
00:04:53.440I mean, it struck me how vague many of his lines were.
00:04:59.380And I think that while there probably were some appeals there that he made to the center, you know, there was a line he had where he said, we're not going to defund the police.
00:05:13.620I think the perceptions of this administration as captive to the far left are really problematic, even if that's often exaggerated.
00:05:24.980I think that the hardest thing that the Democrats are going to have to contend with over the next few months is a version of what we saw unfolding in Texas last night with the primaries in the southern part of the state where you have a progressive and a moderate who are headed off into a very contentious runoff.
00:05:40.980And if that progressive ends up winning, it's going to really make it hard for the party to say that it's it's representative of most Americans and not a far left entity.
00:05:52.340Mm hmm. I want to get to that defund the police thing in one second.
00:05:55.260But, you know, to your point of this, you know, wish list, this Democratic utopia, all I could think while watching it was, OK, so he's throwing out these huge things.
00:06:04.680And again, we're going to cure cancer and we're going to have all sorts of provisions for Democrats that they've been asking him for.
00:06:10.660And I thought, all right, well, in 2022, I I would like to have the body of Giselle and the skin of J-Lo and the energy of a 12 year old, along with the metabolism.
00:06:21.180Those are my goals for myself. They're just about as attainable as his goals.
00:06:26.820And the thing about Joe Biden's list, Charles, is that it was sort of he wanted to have it both ways on so many things.
00:06:35.100Right. Like build back better is gone, but I'm bringing it back in pieces.
00:06:38.500I'm going to do something about inflation. But here are all these huge things, these spending measures, which, by the way, I know I cannot get through.
00:06:45.600But they're going to make you feel good as you go to sleep tonight.
00:06:48.260Neither party at the moment is especially coherent.
00:06:53.120And when I say that, I don't just mean that both parties have broad coalitions full of people who disagree with one another, although that is true.
00:07:01.840I mean that their stated policy aims are often incoherent.
00:07:05.460But it was remarkable last night to hear incoherence from one person, the president of the United States.
00:07:13.460There were two moments that jumped out to me.
00:07:15.500The first was that Biden tried his folksy shtick about how he understands the effects of inflation.
00:07:21.180He knows what it does. He understands why people are so angry.
00:07:25.220And almost in the next sentence, he touted the two trillion dollars in spending that his party rushed through last March, which is responsible for exacerbating inflation on a grand scale.
00:07:51.620And the reason he's doing that is that he has found out from focus groups that when Democrats talk about inflation, people don't really buy the idea that it's because we have greedy corporations.
00:08:03.160But they do buy, erroneously, because this is economic nonsense, the idea that we can fight inflation by bringing manufacturing back to the United States.
00:08:10.920So he went all in on that. But then he proposed a whole litany of ideas that would make it much more difficult to bring manufacturing back to the United States by making us less competitive, by making labor more expensive and by making capital likely to flee.
00:08:30.520So, you know, in a sense, this was this was a president who was trying to push buttons and work around the public's distaste for him, but doing so in no thought through way at all.
00:08:43.640I think in reading opinion pieces from the left and the right this morning, most people are agreed that in agreement that the best part was on Ukraine, where he kicked it off at the top and they had a real moment of unity where both sides stood and clapped for what he was saying.
00:09:04.520He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead, he met with a mall, a wall of strength he never anticipated or imagined. He met the Ukrainian people.
00:09:17.120Our forces are not engaged and will not engage in the conflict with Russian forces in Ukraine.
00:09:24.300The United States and our allies will defend every inch of territory that is NATO territory with the full force of our collective power.
00:09:32.380What did you make of that, Jeremy? Because I one point somebody made was great.
00:09:39.140He's rolling along strong. He's got everybody standing.
00:09:41.540And then it just sort of pivoted to something that was more like like you said, a wish list or sort of a college discussion.
00:09:48.080It's just like a couple of minutes later, we're talking about such small minutiae after this big moment.
00:09:54.920One pundit was suggesting shorter, less pick your top three points, get in, get out, sit down.
00:10:00.960Right. Well, that, Megan, is the problem with the speech overall. There was nothing unifying it.
00:10:05.860And I think right there you have a perfect example of the way that Democrats have struggled to connect with voters.
00:10:13.880OK, so on the surface, he's saying the right things.
00:10:17.780Yes, the Ukrainian people are standing up. The United States is behind you, Ukraine.
00:10:22.080However, there was no concrete action to back that up.
00:10:26.600And there I think people are kind of left with the question, OK, that's great.
00:10:30.460It's nice rhetoric. But what are you going to do?
00:10:33.600And I'm not saying that I think there is a whole lot militarily the United States should be or could be doing right now that wouldn't drag us into a full on military conflict with Russia.
00:10:43.540But it's an example of the way that I think the Democratic Party has has struggled to effectively speak to people's concerns and anxieties.
00:10:54.020And this is why the Republicans and Donald Trump have been making really big inroads with a lot of voters who wouldn't ordinarily think about voting Republicans.
00:11:02.060Republicans right now are just better at channeling the anxieties, the fears of voters out there and giving them a sense that that they understand, to borrow a cliche phrase here, the voters pain.
00:11:17.940They there's an there's an empathy there that is is much more concrete that I think works for everybody from Donald Trump on on down, who is speaking to this notion that there are Americans who feel like their government isn't doing much to help them in what are pretty depressing and trying times for a lot of people.
00:11:43.240He tried. He tried. He tried to do to do the Joe Biden folksy. We've heard him do it a million times, Jeremy. Right. I get it. I get it.
00:11:50.740You know, the increased prices, the inflate. Trust me, I get it. But there wasn't a lot that followed to make you actually believe he gets it.
00:11:59.160I think that's exactly right there. Like like we said, he was very short on specifics of how he would address it.
00:12:05.000But then when I listened to Kim Reynolds speech delivered the Republican response, there was a real fire there.
00:12:13.000Like, you know, she was speaking to a lot of the concerns that voters have, that their elected officials aren't representing them, that they aren't listening to them.
00:12:22.100One Democratic strategist I spoke to before the speech said, like, you know, the Republicans understand that parents, for example, don't want to hear that school boards don't want them involved in their children's education.
00:12:34.100And, you know, regardless of the specifics of any particular debate in any given school district, that's true.
00:12:41.060Parents don't want to be told to shut up and sit down, just like average voters on any number of concerns don't want to be told, oh, well, what you're worried about isn't isn't really a big deal.
00:12:53.240So, you know, let's let's let's move on. And I think the Democratic Party's problem and what Biden's lack of specifics last night really points to is the struggle that Democrats have had in acknowledging people's problems, whether that's inflation, whether that's crime, whether that's what the curriculum that's being taught in schools.
00:13:12.700They have a denial problem. And they until they learn to speak to the concerns that not just, you know, Republican or even centrist voters have, but that like many Democratic voters, many Democratic parents have, they're going to come up short.
00:13:28.920Charles, it makes me wonder whether it's good old fashioned shame, but most politicians don't feel that.
00:13:33.420But, you know, the old you can't kill your parents and then beg for mercy on the ground that you're an orphan.
00:13:38.320Like, do you is there any chance Joe Biden's not touting those things and not speaking about his understanding of the working class?
00:13:44.240Because he knows very well that his exorbitant spending has helped put them in the position they're in now, not to mention, you know, these covid mandates that have resulted in the loss of so many of their jobs and so on and so forth.
00:14:39.500And the cancer thing you mentioned earlier is a good illustration of this.
00:14:43.460The way that Joe Biden talks about cancer is indicative of somebody who has spent his whole life in politics.
00:14:50.900Obviously, everyone wants to fight and defeat cancer.
00:14:54.680But Joe Biden seems at one level to believe that if the government gets more involved, we'll do it.
00:14:59.960That we haven't done this thus far because the government hasn't been sufficiently supportive.
00:15:05.800And that's not why we haven't defeated cancer.
00:15:09.440And that, as far as I can see, is his view on pretty much everything.
00:15:14.680What he is interested in doing tends to change because he likes to keep himself at the center of the Democratic Party at any given point.
00:15:22.740This is one reason he's moved so far left, because the Democratic Party has.
00:15:26.680Joe Biden is not a man who spends a great deal of time thinking about ideology or policy.
00:15:31.260He moves with the wind, at least the wind as it is defined by the Democratic Party.
00:15:38.800And so what he wants to do alters over time.
00:15:42.360But his constant is that government is good and that Democrats running the government is good for the little guy.
00:15:51.100And the problem he has at the moment is that Democrats running the government is not especially good for the little guy.
00:15:57.760Now, again, I don't think that all of the problems that Americans are facing are Joe Biden's fault or the Democratic Party's fault or frankly, the government's fault.
00:16:05.700I do think, though, that he can't get out of that mindset.
00:16:10.580He made a speech about how every single thing that is currently wrong or every single thing that is currently motivating the members of his party and his coalition could be fixed if the government came in and did it.
00:16:23.020Even though there is almost no chance of the government coming in and doing pretty much anything he proposed.
00:16:39.160And I'd love to get your reaction, Jeremy.
00:16:40.380First, I personally thought it was not a good idea to yet again raise his son Bo's death.
00:16:45.120At the same time that he was totally ignoring the death of the 13 service members in pulling out of Afghanistan, just don't if you're not going to go there, not going to touch Afghanistan, you're not going to touch on, you know, the 13 dead Marines and service personnel, then don't raise your own son's death.
00:17:01.720You know, Charles has talked about this before.
00:17:28.640I like to get my information from both sides of the aisle.
00:17:30.460And today they had a great report about what actually Joe Biden had been doing months prior to right now to try to generate unity amongst the Europeans against Putin.
00:17:42.860And that was the subject of the podcast.
00:17:44.540It was about how the Europeans came together.
00:17:46.600And they didn't give Joe Biden all the credit, but they talked about how he had been going to the Europeans and sharing the American intel and saying, no, this is what's going to happen.
00:17:56.100You need to take a hard look at this and really sold it personally for them to believe it.
00:18:00.220And it was a great story about how there's this other guy who wears like sneakers and bad suits, who is in the European Union, who everybody sort of mocks normally.
00:18:08.640But this one little guy who understood the importance and value of U.S. intelligence went country to country within the EU, trying to convince various factions.
00:18:22.840Oh, I hear that in The Daily and not the State of the Union.
00:18:26.100I think it speaks to the larger problem that this administration has had with talking about the right things.
00:18:34.060They seem to constantly be on the subject, on the wrong subject, really.
00:18:39.500I mean, and this is not just something that I hear Republicans, conservatives criticizing this president for.
00:18:45.780It's something I hear Democrats talking a lot about, too, is that one of the things that voters will punish you for undoubtedly is that if they believe you are not on the right.
00:18:56.100The subject, if you are not connecting with what is important to them in that moment.
00:19:02.000And when America was concerned about, you know, the coronavirus restrictions and Afghanistan, Democrats were busy fighting each other over this infrastructure bill.
00:19:15.020Right now, when the world's attention and America's attention is focused on this conflict in Eastern Europe, the president isn't really talking about why they should care, why they should, frankly, look to what his administration has done and be proud of that.
00:19:36.520And I think that's what you're identifying there.
00:19:38.420It's just it's an inability to talk about the right things.
00:19:42.580And if that doesn't change, if the kind of lack of a coherent message that we saw last night in the State of the Union isn't fixed, I don't see how Democrats are going to be able to communicate with the country in a way that puts them back in the same place where they were two years ago, which is we are the party that can restore normalcy and competence to the government.
00:20:06.740It's so true. Talk about missed opportunity. It's like I've learned all about the beams that go in certain buildings, but I didn't learn any of this stuff that actually would have been unifying, would have instilled some patriotic feelings and as a result, some good feelings about him.
00:20:20.860But nope, we you mentioned it, Jeremy, Jeremy, a second ago, the defund the police thing.
00:20:26.520I don't believe the solution is to defund the police. We should fund the police.
00:20:30.060OK, well, that that is not representative of a huge faction of his party.
00:20:37.200And and it's not in touch with what we saw happen over the past two years in this country to the great consternation of many black, white, Democrat, Republican.
00:20:49.400We're going to play that moment, Joe, what Joe Biden said and what the Democrats around him have been saying prior to this.
00:20:57.860When we come back after a very quick break, don't go away.
00:21:00.800Let's talk about this defund the police moment to listen to Joe Biden last night.
00:21:13.020You you would have thought there's absolutely zero daylight between Joe Biden and even Donald Trump on the issue of defunding the cops.
00:21:21.280Here's what the president said last night, we should all agree.
00:21:24.580The answer is not to defund the police is to fund the police.
00:21:29.000Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training, resources and training they need to protect our community.
00:21:48.140Look, look, Kamala Harris on her feet. Kamala Harris, who's been pretty explicitly on the other side.
00:21:56.160But forget them, because the Democrat Party, Democratic Party has so many representatives who have been pushing for this and who got it over the past couple of years, resulting in disaster after disaster in cities like Minneapolis.
00:22:08.060We put together just a short list of examples. Here they are.
00:22:12.320Suck it up. Defunding the police has to happen. We need to defund the police.
00:22:16.360Mayor Eric Garcetti saying, take some of the money from policing, about one hundred fifty million dollars.
00:22:20.940I applaud Eric Garcetti for doing what he's done.
00:22:23.540Not only do we need to disinvest from police, but we need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.
00:22:32.080So, yes, defund your butts. Defund you.
00:22:34.660Yes, I support the reallocation of resources from NYPD.
00:22:39.640We will be moving funding from the NYPD to youth initiatives and social services.
00:22:45.680They are talking about reducing the allocation of resources to that department.
00:22:50.240And I think every single city in this country ought to be thinking about the same thing.
00:23:36.080I think there's two things to say here.
00:23:39.560The first is it would be churlish not to applaud Biden for taking this position.
00:23:45.280The purpose of politics is to convince people that you're right and they're wrong.
00:23:49.980Now, Biden has never been a defund the police guy, but it should be seen as a victory for those who are against this idea that he felt the need to stand up there.
00:24:02.940What you actually want is for the other side to adopt all your ideas, because then you don't have to fight very hard.
00:24:08.520And the fact that Joe Biden said this does signal a shift and it is a good thing that he's not on board with this.
00:24:16.260So I would certainly give him that the political problem for him, as you say, is that he's still taking a defensive action there.
00:24:26.120He felt the need to say it because his party, not all of them, but certainly the most vocal elements, have created this hostage.
00:24:35.140Bill Clinton did not say fund the police.
00:24:39.140George W. Bush did not say fund the police.
00:24:41.340Barack Obama did not say fund the police.
00:24:43.280Why? Because they had nothing to respond to.
00:24:46.940Certainly there have been criticisms of the police, some of which are warranted.
00:24:50.780But this movement is something of a weight around Biden's neck.
00:24:56.800And so although I applaud him for saying it, he probably didn't want to have to, that this is not a good thing for him to have to respond to, and that it is still out there is going to hurt his party going forward, especially, I suspect, in the sort of moderate and suburban seats that he's going to need in 2022 and if he runs for re-election in 2024.
00:25:21.140You know, Jeremy, Defund the Police is an explicit piece of the Black Lives Matter platform.
00:25:44.320He's quoting Joe Biden with resources and training.
00:25:46.780And then he responds, what freaking bollocks.
00:25:49.180Yes, but it's what whites want to hear.
00:25:52.220Now, the truth is, it's not just whites who want to hear that.
00:25:56.260It's actually black voters, even more than white voters who have pushed this reversal.
00:26:01.880And if you look back at the history of what they did in Minneapolis and what they did in Detroit and so on, all these other cities that fell victim to the defund the police pushers, it was black voters who were objecting the loudest.
00:26:16.300In in Minneapolis, three quarters of Minneapolis black voters were against defund the police.
00:26:22.420And in fact, what they said there was, well, what about just having a Department of Public Safety where we reimagine the police department?
00:26:29.400And they were like, not only no, but hell no, no, we don't want that blacks more than whites saw the same thing in Detroit.
00:26:36.400So while people will try to racialize this, you know, the push to fund the police as opposed to defund them, the truth is the facts belie that claim.
00:26:46.080Mm hmm. It's it's not only untrue that that's what whites exclusively want to hear and that blacks don't want to hear that.
00:26:57.180Neither do Hispanics. If you look at what happened in southern Texas in the 2020 congressional races, a lot of the backlash to the Democratic Party there was because of the heavy law enforcement presence.
00:27:10.360A lot of the people who live down there are in the Border Patrol or they are in some type of law enforcement that they rely on for their family's survival.
00:27:20.340And they don't like to hear defund the police slogans any more than than people who live in high crime areas do.
00:27:28.260And I think that, you know, I actually want to point out, Megan, that while there are loud voices in the Democratic Party that, you know, you played the majority, vast majority of Democratic voters and people who are liberal and even the vast majority of the Democrats in Congress don't support this.
00:27:47.400The problem is they just haven't pushed back when the loudest voices call for defunding the police.
00:27:53.680Well, and the second the second problem is that it's actually been happening. You know, I mean, I lived in New York City.
00:27:57.620One of the final straws in in our relationship between Manhattan and our family was when de Blasio said he was going to defund the police by one hundred million dollars.
00:28:05.160It was like, peace out. Right. And so it actually it's not just the rhetoric of people like Cori Bush or Rashida Tlaib.
00:28:11.680It's actually been happening in major blue cities.
00:28:15.000Yeah. And but voters have also rejected like the overwhelmingly liberal Democratic voters in Minneapolis rejected, you know, the Department of Public Safety proposal that you were talking about.
00:28:25.260And in New York City now, the new mayor, a former cop has has has has very wisely shifted away from that kind of talk.
00:28:33.940It's talking about how we need to have a better relationship with with our police forces.
00:28:37.460And he didn't change in his proposed budget this year, didn't didn't touch police funding, which is, you know, basically a repudiation of what the people under in the de Blasio era were calling for from the city council on up.
00:28:51.980So, yeah, I think there is a much bigger recognition now that the Democrats need to learn how to how to respond when the ideas of a relative minority of people in their in their party have no constituents.
00:29:08.660I mean, there is no constituency for defund the police.
00:29:12.600It's it's a it's a it's a tiny fringe movement.
00:29:17.460So but it gets outsized attention and and Democrats struggle with how to deal with that.
00:29:23.520I think, you know, one of the things that we saw play out in the 2020 elections and I get into this in my book is the way that Democrats struggled to even say things that were complimentary about law enforcement.
00:29:36.700I talk about this race in Iowa where the the Republicans started doing polling, asking people, OK, do you agree with the statement?
00:29:45.560Are there a few are cops mostly good people, but there are a few bad apples who need to be thrown out?
00:29:50.520Or do you believe that the policing in the United States is systemically broken and we need to start from scratch?
00:29:57.460And overwhelmingly, they agreed with the former that there are a few bad apples, but that most cops are good people.
00:30:02.920But Democrats never figured out how to express that.
00:30:07.380And they're still struggling with how to do that.
00:30:09.660Charles, this sort of speaks to a wider point of some of the items that Joe Biden was hitting last night.
00:30:14.620So, OK, defund the police is not the right move.
00:30:17.480It's fun. The police without any acknowledgement of how that became an issue and why it's on the mind of so many Americans who have lost their safety, in part because of these policies.
00:30:31.700Well, the American people know very well that he's implemented a whole host of policies that have, let's I think it's fair to say, loosened the border as opposed to securing it.
00:30:43.240And they know that's on him. And he ticked off some small things.
00:30:46.200We have new technology like scanners to detect better drug smuggling.
00:30:51.060OK. Joint patrols with Mexico and Guatemala.
00:30:53.680All right. But we're not we're missing sort of the big policies that, for example, President Trump put in place that did make a dent, didn't solve it, but did make a dent.
00:31:02.680And then the big the mother of all of those was covid.
00:31:35.440Our kids need to be in school under the new guidelines.
00:31:38.260Most Americans and most of the country can now go mask free and based on projections and thanks to the progress we've made in the past year, COVID-19 no longer need control our lives.
00:31:52.840So how did how did all of that happen to us?
00:31:55.760How did the schools stay closed when they should have been open?
00:31:58.700How did covid become such a partisan dividing line?
00:32:01.640Could it have been all the rhetoric demonizing people who had already had covid but didn't want to get a vaccine, medical workers, et cetera?
00:32:26.440There's two years worth of tests and it just so happened that March 1st, 2022 is a cutoff point.
00:32:34.220Now, I found this very, very annoying as a Floridian to be lectured about political divisions on covid by President Biden and his party, because here, as I've said to you before, everyone that I know did not initially see this as a political question.
00:32:55.020And it was quickly turned into one and certain states and approaches and governors were vilified nationally, including by President Biden.
00:33:06.500And for him to to talk in that saccharine way, I think is is unreasonable.
00:33:14.500I think more broadly, the three issues you mentioned shows that the Democrats can also suffer from having so much cultural power.
00:33:25.880There are a lot of ways in which the Democratic Party benefits from its prominence in the media, in academia and entertainment.
00:33:34.240But sometimes it can become captured by those institutions and it can have fringe messages or elite messages amplified to its detriment.
00:33:47.940And it seems to me that the defund the police case that Jeremy is right when he says this is not held as a value by the vast majority of Democratic voters, but he is popular among wealthier, more heavily educated and more nationally influential types.
00:34:12.300And so it was pushed out there was it was it was promulgated across the entertainment world, across the media world, across the academic world.
00:34:22.440You have, therefore, a Democratic Party whose reputation on questions such as defund the police, enforce the border and our covid rules is hostage to a smaller group, but a more influential group than the party represents at large.
00:34:43.920And I think for once, Democrats are really suffering from this, because if you talk to sort of rank and file Democrats across this country, they do not sound like the New York Times editorial page or the Washington Post editorial page on the question of covid.
00:35:00.740They don't sound like the faculty at Harvard.
00:35:03.780But a lot of those people are really struggling to give this up and until they do things, even that Biden is not responsible for, are going to continue to weigh him down.
00:35:21.120I mean, it does seem like Joe Biden couldn't really have a spike the ball on the end zone moment, just given the past behavior and messaging from the administration, but also because there's a strong piece of his base that is still very afraid of covid.
00:35:37.060Jeremy, I mean, speaking of the daily, they did a deep dive into this with David Lanhart not long ago on how there's it's become so partisan that like the hardcore left is just definitely not willing to let go of covid.
00:35:50.140And that's one of his challenges in declaring victory and sort of trying to clear a path between now and November for we beat it.
00:35:58.360Forget those two years in the masks and the mask mandates and the vaccine mandates and so on.
00:36:03.980Right. And this is a perfect example of, you know, I most of my college, the vast, vast, vast majority of my colleagues in the media are not the kind of people who are making things up.
00:36:18.740But the problem with the way that a lot of the media portrays these issues is is perfectly emblematic of this larger struggle with the Democratic Party in that they are talking and promoting the ideas that only a relative small elite is talking about on social media.
00:36:38.740And there's a huge difference between the conversation that is happening on social media among progressives and many in the media and what voters are saying back at home.
00:36:49.000Defund the police is a perfect example of that.
00:36:54.160I think the majority of the country, you know, has is if not moved on, is ready to deal with it, ready to live with covid in a way that does not restrict them.
00:37:06.640And if you look at even in New York City, like I live in New York City, I was walking down the sidewalk the other day and I heard a woman on her cell phone saying, thank God this, you know, the mask will be over.
00:37:16.400And there are people who have you know, I know there's this this this this cliche that New York, everybody is like super liberal and covid phobic.
00:37:25.160But people have been done with masks outside here for a really long time.
00:37:29.100And you have seen you don't see people wearing them as much, nearly as much as you used to.
00:37:33.080And if you're seeing that in New York City, that's an example of, I think, how people have just the leaders of the Democratic Party in a lot of ways.
00:37:41.220And many progressives are just out of step with how people want to live their lives and what they're worried about right now.
00:37:47.680To your point about the media not getting, you know, what really is on the mind of the voters.
00:37:51.540I think it was CBS, but yesterday they did a story on how the war in Ukraine is going to affect one particular transgender person because, you know, the Russians aren't so pro transgender issue.
00:38:06.820Like, um, talk about like a day 200 story running on day six.
00:38:13.560Like, OK, we can get to that changes in Ukraine once Russia takes over.
00:38:18.340If they take over, we could get there. But right now there's actual still fighting in the street and the Ukrainians still believe they might actually pull this out.
00:38:24.960And the international community is rallying behind them. And that is really the story.
00:38:28.560I don't think people are really focused on the one in any event.
00:38:31.780OK, let me pause there. I'll do another break and come back.
00:38:34.060I got to ask you about the weirdest moment with Nancy Pelosi and the closed fist clapping about the fire pits.
00:38:41.600I don't know what was going on there, but we have to talk about that and about, you know, Biden and his many gaffes that just continue to surface and what we should be taking from that.
00:38:52.260More with Charles and Jeremy and more on Jeremy's book coming up.
00:38:55.000Back with me now, Charles C.W. Cook of National Review and The New York Times is Jeremy Peters, who is the author of a brand new book called Insurgency, how Republicans lost their party and got everything they ever wanted.
00:39:15.300Let's start with that, Jeremy. What does that mean?
00:39:17.240OK, so I don't think you can tell the story of the modern Republican Party and Donald Trump's rise without acknowledging that this wasn't a hostile takeover.
00:39:27.440Trump didn't come in and displace everybody and take command of the party.
00:39:33.960It was a partnership in a lot of ways.
00:39:36.420And what many establishment Republicans agreed to take with the bad that came along with Donald Trump was a lot of the good that they saw from a policy perspective.
00:39:47.240And that's why, you know, when you ask many Republicans from, you know, social conservative, anti-abortion activist types who I spoke a lot to for this book,
00:39:58.440to folks who are more establishment minded, who were part of the Bush wing of the party, they're fine.
00:40:06.300Well, maybe not fine, but they are willing to say that January 6th wasn't all that big of an issue as far as they were concerned.
00:40:17.400They could look past it because Donald Trump delivered the Supreme Court for them.
00:40:21.560And the Supreme Court is about ready to strike down Roe v. Wade, we think.
00:40:24.760So, you know, that's just one example.
00:40:27.280But if you look at the types of Republican policy that were pushed, that was pushed through during Trump's presidency,
00:40:34.760a lot of it was very conventional Republican fare.
00:40:38.300A lot of it, of course, on trade and immigration was not.
00:40:42.020But the establishment of the Republican Party went along with Trump at first reluctantly,
00:40:48.680but then willingly because they saw it was a good deal for them.
00:40:52.600And ultimately, that is Donald Trump's transactional style of politics.
00:40:57.080And he infused the party with that in a way that I think surprised a lot of folks.
00:41:02.200Well, Charles, you're you're a good person to respond to that, because I know you're not a Donald Trump fan.
00:42:45.960And I hope that at some point we'll be able to go back to a politics in which that man is not at the center of everything we believe.
00:42:54.340I heard the regret in your voice at the CPAC straw poll that he still ran away with, 59 percent.
00:43:01.360DeSantis was the next closest, but it wasn't really close unless you took Trump out of it, in which case DeSantis was the heavy favorite.
00:43:08.080But his numbers, Trump's numbers went up this year versus last year.
00:43:11.540And so the Republican Party, they seem to miss him, how that will play out over the next year or so.
00:43:18.020We can only wait and watch and cover as reporters and commentators.
00:43:21.980OK, can I just ask you, because it's a bit of a weird turn, but I've got to ask you about the weirdest moment of last night, which was Nancy Pelosi.
00:43:29.240And as as Joe Biden was talking about the this was wasn't this when he was talking about the burn pits that our servicemen may have been getting cancer from in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
00:43:43.320I don't know what's happening with her fists, but for the audience listening at home, she's got closed fists and she's kind of bouncing them together.
00:43:50.420And she looks, I mean, as the kids would say, awkward AF.
00:44:08.540I think one of the things that that people don't realize who haven't been in the room during these state of the unions is members of Congress have the speech there in front of them.
00:44:18.760And who knows which maybe she read, skipped ahead a few lines to what he said next and was was anticipating that and and and got up a little too quickly.
00:45:31.120He clearly doesn't have the mental acuity anymore to digress.
00:45:37.460Even you see him reaching for stories he's been telling for years and he can't finish them, can't remember them and he can't incorporate them into what he's saying.
00:46:15.840I want to remind the audience that Jeremy's book is called Insurgency, How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.
00:56:26.160They had one a couple of years ago based on Me Too, which I actually thought was even funnier than this one.
00:56:32.120But it is kind of amazing to me as someone who has not been of that ilk to think that people really, really, really believe what they're doing.
00:56:42.860Like they really believe they are right in having masks on this time.
00:56:48.660I think there's a signaling exercise with it that's pretty explicit.
00:56:52.500And we've seen this in school policies too, right?
00:56:54.220Like people were afraid to, up until basically Election Day 2020 in blue states, express out loud too much that they were against school closures because, and this is on the record, lots of people said that they didn't want to be perceived as Trump supporters, right?
00:57:18.960But she used to be a mask kind of fanatic, but then she's now been kind of the leading, put it on the chin or take it off altogether.
00:57:26.960And she's immediately called Trumpy by her classmates in a place where there might be a, yeah, my, you know, my daughter, that's not likely.
00:57:35.760But in a place that probably voted 103 percent for Joe Biden this last time.
00:57:42.900So there's a there's a sense of and you saw this in Portland, right, where Nancy's done a lot of great reporting of people wearing a mask to signal their like a sort of solidarity and their political point of view more than that.
00:57:57.760We had Jennifer say on the program, but we had Jennifer say on the program, who is the head of Levi's and she got forced out because what was her sin?
00:58:09.140Was she out there parading against, you know, with the truckers against the vax mandates?
00:58:13.180No. Was she even parading against the mask mandates?
00:58:16.780No. She wanted the schools to be open in San Francisco, which now we've seen.
00:59:46.020I mean, Bill, the head of the Weather Underground, which bombed several buildings.
00:59:49.200They actually did blow up a building, including themselves.
00:59:51.520Not Bill and his wife, but their group and so on.
00:59:53.720And that's his parents and then his adoptive parents.
00:59:57.400No wonder the guy does not want to fight crime.
00:59:59.320And now he's gotten all his bad press for the murder rate in San Francisco and the crime rate and the carjackings and the car thefts and so on.
01:00:07.020And unlike London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, who's like, oh, shit, I'm going to pivot on this.