Amanda Carpenter and Evan Gershkovich: Trump's and Putin's Authoritarian Projects

The Bulwark Daily

The episode features discussions on two major fronts: the potential for democratic backsliding in the U.S. and the realities of journalism u

Key takeaways

• Trump's efforts to use non-citizen voting allegations as a pretext for election interference have largely failed to gain momentum.
• The 'weaponization' project within the DOJ is stalling due to high-profile resignations like Andrew Bailey and Kurt Olson.

Main topics

• U.S. Election Integrity
• Trump's Midterm Strategies

Notable quotes

The project is failing on every level.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a warning about the persistence of authoritarian

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) U.S. voters abroad, have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click Request My Ballot. Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. Speaker 4 (0:26) Hi, friends and fellow students. Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. Register or get tailored support at VoteFromAbroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to VoteFromAbroad.org now and click Request My Ballot and ask to receive it by email. All you got to do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. VoteFromAbroad.org. Speaker 6 (1:04) Hello and welcome to Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller, coming at you live from Washington, D.C., Bulwark HQ. Saw CharlieXDX last night. Segment one, we've got the Charlie of the Bulwark diaspora. Stick around for segment two. We have Evan Gershkovich, who has a new book out, This Cursed Beautiful Land, about the 500 days he spent in a Russian prison targeted by Putin when he was reporting in the country. It's a really great conversation, so do stick around for that. But first... formerly at the bulwark she's now a writer and editor at protectdemocracy.org their sub stack is if you can keep it it's amanda carpenter what's up girl hey Speaker 2 (1:37) i think i should be complimented by being compared to charlie xdx but i'm not totally sure that said i do need some advice my daughter wanted me to take her to a concert her favorite band weezer is in town in dc so we're going i have not been to a concert probably in 15 years so i have No idea what I'm supposed to do, but I think the vibes will be high and I'm very excited. Speaker 6 (1:59) Where is Speaker 2 (1:59) Weezer Speaker 6 (1:59) playing? At Capital Speaker 2 (2:00) One Center in D.C. So we're driving on in on Friday night. They're still Speaker 6 (2:04) selling out the arenas. The Shins are going to open Speaker 2 (2:07) and Silver Sun pickups. Speaker 6 (2:09) Weezer, look at this, Weezer Blue Album, when I was in fifth grade, was the first CD I bought. I bought tapes before that because we're old. But the first CD I bought was the Weezer Blue Album. Say it ain't so. Maybe we'll take people out with a little say it ain't so. Well, Speaker 2 (2:25) let me inform you of this. My kids, who are middle school and a high schooler, they all like to collect CDs. like vintage albums now. So she does have the blue CD. My son is into gorillas. Like all these bands are big right now and they all have CD collections that they're building out like old timey things that sit on their shelves. So live with that one. Just put me in the Speaker 6 (2:47) grave. Okay. You'll have a great time. I'll send you to, she'll have a great time. Reno's bumping. They're doing some renovations. It was good last night. Same, same spot. We're kind of already doing a vibe check. So let's start with that because you have to schlep in to Capital One Arena from the boonies. You're out there in Trump country. I do like to just kind of do a check-in with you. What's the sign? Are you seeing signs? The hats, hat count, small talk at children's sporting events. Catching any vibes? Speaker 2 (3:15) I've got to say the signs have not been out. It is very low-key. We ran a 5K on Saturday night, which was a fundraiser for our local sports team. My son dusted me, which is just embarrassing because he's... 13 years old, has not trained and just demolished me. So that's good and bad in many ways. But the local Republican Party was sponsoring it. And it was just no signs about anything, just the elephant, like kind of old school. So I was a little bit like, oh, is this going to be like a MAGA thing? No, low key, quiet, vibes are low. Speaker 6 (3:47) Not to brag about. It gives me just a slight worry about the polls. It kind of cuts both ways, right? On the one hand, midterms are all about turnout and enthusiasm. So if the Democrats are really enthused to answer polls, that means they're going to be enthused to turnout. But I'm a little worried that the MAGA crowd is just kind of embarrassed right now. You hear this in Sarah's focus groups and like they get a political poll and they're like, yeah, I'm not going to do that today. But maybe they still, but I'm a little worried that there's kind of a little undercount happening. We'll keep an eye on it. I want to do the protect democracy side of the midterms first. And since we've been hopium-pilled lately on the podcast, I want to start with the hopium side of it, which is they have a ton of failures on this front. And they've been trying to rig the midterms or at least put their thumb on the scale or influence the midterms. Basically, since as soon as he got in, redistricting flop, the mail-in voting takeover is a flop, election lies, a bunch of other stuff. Just kind of wondering what your assessment is, having been monitoring and fighting all these efforts. Speaker 2 (4:48) I'm happy to walk through their failures and flops, but I don't want people to think that we are complacent or advising anyone to be. Because any of this stuff could go haywire at Speaker 6 (4:58) any moment in time. Speaker 2 (4:58) We're just pointing and laughing. Yeah. We're not complacent. We're just pointing and Speaker 6 (5:01) laughing while staying vigilant. Speaker 2 (5:03) Absolutely. So our framework for analyzing the election was always that Trump is going to deceive the public with election lies so that he could disrupt the process and deny results later. So this deceive portion. was big. What was the next big lie going to be? And then you saw him setting up all these allegations of non-citizen voting, voter fraud, setting up all these pretexts so that you could have the federal database to purge voters. None of that has worked so far. As you've mentioned, the mail-in voting takeover has flopped. The save... database that they've tried to get everyone to use on a mandatory basis has largely flopped, although there was that Supreme Court decision on Friday where they are allowing to go forward for individual checks. So I do want to say here very plainly, the people most at risk for being flagged. on this falsely are naturalized citizens. So if you are a naturalized citizen planning to vote, please check your registration now. If you get something in the mail asking you to affirm that, you need to follow up with it. So we really need to raise... That's a good flag. If you have a naturalized Speaker 6 (6:06) citizen friend that isn't listening to the Bulwark podcast, maybe give them a heads up. Speaker 2 (6:11) Yep, yep. And so be on the lookout for that. Check your registration and make a plan to vote. But that said... Getting everyone to conform to this federal database that, you know, the USPS is going to be in charge of has failed. You saw these attempts come out after Trump's big election speech in July that was largely a flop because even networks like Fox would not cover it. And people like Maria Bartiromo are benched. You saw Secretary Lutnick, which I am being very careful to say correctly, had that big census report that he said was going to find thousands of non-citizen voters flop. Everyone could see through the fake statistics on that almost immediately. You then had Mark Wayne Mullen come out with another separate report more recently where he was saying, oh, we have 16,000 illegal voters. Another flop. That number went down to zero. And so there's been these attempts to try to set this up. It's not working. That's not to say. They're not still peddling lies about Chinese parts in voting machines and pressuring Letnet to designate voting machines as critical infrastructure. This stuff is still out there. But the big lies that they have tried to push as pretext to set up these processes are not working. And so our message to people has been that, yes, we were worried that they were going to throw up obstacles between the voters and the ballot box. But right now, that path to the ballot box is clear. Everyone needs to make a plan to take advantage of that. And then we're all going to work together to do two more things. Make sure every vote is counted and every rightful winner is seated. So this is not over yet, of course, but their plans are failing spectacularly. Speaker 6 (7:46) I wanted to dial in on one of the things that you mentioned because it was so stupid. And I forget if it was when I was on vacation or if it was just so stupid I didn't want to deal with it or if I was leading into vacation. But the election lie speech, the big speech that he gave, I do think it's important to kind of step back sometimes and take their lies at face value rather than just glossing over them or make fun of them. Right. I mean, the president of the United States gave a primetime address where he accused China of rigging our elections in the past. And that was two months ago. And here we are last week. He invites Chairman Xi to the White House and fets him, compliments him, says how great of a guy he is, which betrays either an unbelievable weakness that the person he thinks rigged the election he still wants to suck up to, or like his heart isn't even in the lie, you know? Speaker 2 (8:42) Everything is done at Trump's convenience. I mean, this lie that they're peddling is set up for his convenience so that he can deny results that he doesn't like. And I don't want to dismiss this because that lie is still active. I don't know if you saw just yesterday, Secretary of War Pete Hexeth put out a memo saying that, you know, I'm on special notice to make sure that there is no foreign interference in the election with machines. And so was he just doing that to say like, oh, I'm kind of doing something and make the boss happy? Maybe. But they're still on this. And so they very much want this pretext so that they can go raid voting machines potentially. All these scenarios are still on the table. I'm just saying they don't have the momentum and the buy-in from the public for that fever pitch that we saw in like 2020. And Speaker 6 (9:29) they don't even have the guys to execute it, right? I mean, part of it is on the media side, the propaganda. You know, we've talked about this a couple times the last couple weeks, but like the right wing. Like podcast, Manosphere stuff, like they're not even talking about him anymore. He's not giving them a narrative. You can't. These guys need a little bit more of a narrative if you're going to try to blame China for stealing the elections. You need something to go Speaker 5 (9:52) on. Speaker 6 (9:52) And then you bring Xi to the White House and don't say anything. Like, what are you supposed to say if you're Benny Johnson about this? Like, oh, the president is, you know, maybe it's QAnon. Maybe he was really mean to him behind the scenes. You know, play a 40 chess Speaker 2 (10:04) and make a deal with Xi. You know, you can see how people can get there. And people Speaker 6 (10:08) are leaving. Yeah, as you've pointed out. You had Joe DeGeneva. who was brought in to look into how former administration officials were improperly investigating Trump and they were going to go after the investigators. Him and Kurt Olson quit. The number two at the FBI, Andrew Bailey, he resigned. That's another number two. Dan Bongino had already left. He's a big election denier. One thing I'm worried about is kind of the bottom up. Like there obviously are still some true believers in the county offices, but they don't really have. people to execute the scale of what they would like to do with the election. Speaker 2 (10:49) Yeah, I mean, I guess we could put on the scenario that these people are leaving so that they can act from the outside in. Like, I don't totally expect someone like Eagle Ed Martin to totally disappear. But the point is that they don't have people in positions. to press the levers of power that they planned, I think is absolutely right. I mean, we went from Pam Bondi to Todd Blanche and Tulsi's gone. And a lot of the people involved in that Fulton County raid, which I thought was extremely instructive because they did get access to materials that was based on a bad warrant full of bad information that never should have been accepted. But that is good because now we can put people on notice that you don't have to take these claims at face value. Judges do have some kind of obligation to evaluate the veracity of the documents when you were presented with a search warrant like that. But the idea, I mean, we can't say it yet, but I think we need to get comfortable with saying that the whole Trump 2025 project is going down the tubes. It is failing on every level. If you really look at it, they had a good... robust six months and getting what they wanted. But now if you look at his big weaponization project for the Department of Justice, you mentioned the fact that Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, I'll get that right someday. And Kurt Olson have left. They were supposed to be the ones spearheading this grand conspiracy thing where they were going to get all the bad guys who went after Trump and put those scalps up on the wall. They have no case. They have left without prosecuting anyone. And I know that there are some indictments going forward, but as a project and what they promised and what this big campaign of retribution that they said was going to rain down on anyone who ever criticized Trump or pointed out his illegality, it's just not come true. And so I really hope that people aren't afraid anymore. There was a time where people were afraid, and I think retreating to their respective corners, but... This project is failing. And if the midterms go the way that the polling indicates, I think we really need to start branding this presidency as the worst one we've ever seen, failing by its own merits, by its own design, and just showing that we have rejected this authoritarian direction once and for all, and then really recalibrate to hold people accountable and make sure it never happens again. Speaker 6 (13:11) Yeah, it's funny. You know, 1984, North Korea, taxpayer-funded propaganda that Trump is running. I kind of locked in and focused on the line about how he's going to expel the warmongers from our government, which just shows how out of date. Show yourself the door. Yeah, the audio that they were taking was for this old ad that we're all paying for with our money. But there's another line in there, too, about how we will demolish the deep state. And I think this ties together to what you're talking about, the failure of the weaponization project. The fact that, you know, the MAGA media sphere doesn't have a good story to even tell their own people. And it's like, Sam and Will did a thing yesterday on Beau French, this guy running for railroad commissioner, this racist guy in Texas, and how many times in the past he called for like the execution of Trump's foes. Like this was all very common language in this world. Like Trump was going to get in and they were going to jail all the people that had come for them that had supposedly weaponized the government and the Biden administration. And they have bupkis. Again, what is Benny Johnson and Dan Bongino supposed to talk about on their podcast? Like who are the deep state operatives that they've gotten? Nothing. Yeah. Speaker 2 (14:24) I mean, again. I don't want to get too far ahead of things, but I think we can fairly start to judge us on the merits. Go back and look at what they set out to do. The high standard that they put out for themselves. I don't care what metric you want to put on it, whether it's the bullshit retribution or the spending cuts or the terrorists or the war. I mean, you name it. I am trying to generously think of one thing that they are succeeding at. And I think I could have got there in the first six months. Speaker 6 (14:52) The border. Speaker 2 (14:53) I don't know. His own people don't think there's enough deportations. So I can say that you're doing deportations, but by their standard for what they set out to do. Speaker 6 (15:00) I don't mean the immigration Speaker 2 (15:00) policy Speaker 6 (15:00) overall, but like the border, yeah. Right, but Speaker 2 (15:02) you have no one to blame. You had a Republican Congress, right? No. No excuses. So I'm ready to start framing that out. Speaker 6 (15:13) All right. Well, we have ongoing corruption efforts. That is one thing they've succeeded at. Amanda. They do have some ongoing corruption efforts. I enjoyed this. Shout out to Zach Everson over on Blue Sky. He skieded this. He identified this. A Don Jr. backed drone parts manufacturer congratulated an Eric Trump backed drone manufacturer on winning a DOD contract. People don't even understand the scale of this. One of them was called Unusual Machines. The other one's called Extend. This is just how the business of our government is working. Our national security contractors, like you've got to put a Trump family member on the board in order to ensure that you're going to get a taxpayer money. Speaker 2 (15:58) It is stunning the level of involvement that Trump and Lutnik and Witkoff's son, are they all sons? Probably all sons, are involved in defense, tech, AI, crypto, policy and contracts. I mean, it is a gold mine for them. And in many cases, I don't know if you looked at these mining contracts that some of them are also involved in. Kazakhstan. I Speaker 6 (16:22) mean, it is Speaker 2 (16:22) like the Solyndra. A lot of expertise on Kazakhstan. Do Speaker 6 (16:25) you remember Speaker 2 (16:25) Solyndra? Speaker 6 (16:26) Do you remember Solyndra? Yeah. Speaker 2 (16:29) We call it venture socialism. And it's essentially part of the same thing. You have these investors who go in on a project and then get the government financing to back it, even though it is unproven. You don't know what you're going to get. And they get to get out before everything goes in the tank. I mean, we don't know that these projects are going to work out, but they stand to make a lot of money because the Pentagon budget is gone and big on the loans. I mean, I'm not like a big. economic analyst, but I can understand how this works. And it's a scam. And so that there's just so much investigating and following the money to see how this stuff happened that needs to happen in a new Congress. But I do think there's just something even more easy to understand for the general public. And that is Trump is stealing your money. Look at this ballroom. Look at these PSAs that he's putting out. How is he getting the money to do this? Congress never authorized it. There's documentation where he is raiding other pots of money from the Secret Service, from the national parks to do this thing that nobody said he could do. I mean, this is illegal spending. And at some point there has to be a Congress that says, you know what, we're going to assert our spending power because honestly. If Congress does not protect its spending power, what is the point of Congress? You just have a president who can use money to do whatever he wants. You might as well just pack it up and go home. And so on the ballroom,