This is a transcript of a large portion of a recent podcast by the Lincoln Project. It is not perfect, but it is very close to the actual words. I transcribed the portion which I found the most important. I, then, am shining a spotlight on what I found to be the most important and valuable parts of their podcast. Tara correctly notes that a lot of people may not be paying attention because Donald Trump is not in office, not tweeting daily … However, the Republican Party is still engaging in anti-democratic stuff.
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Steve: What Maggie Haberman tweeted, that Trump is telling ‘people’ that he will be reinstated, which people. If it is just his caddie or driver or Don jr or is telling Kevin McCarthy or members of the US Senate ? Who is he telling this to ? John Miller tracked down Bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan. Yet we get this type of vague reporting about Trump which is so important to our democracy. We are in a new era in America which affects Trump remains the leader of America’s first autocratic movement to have taken political power . It is now overtly more autocratic than it was on January sixth. The democracy condition with republicans has deteriorated.
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Adam Kinzinger talked about that tonight (the night of the podcast) although Steve disagrees with the diagnosis that it was the McCarthy visit which brought Trump back to life because Trump was never gone. Trump has always been their leader. We are in a new era in this country that requires people to wake up and face squarely a danger. At the core, right, why does democracy even matter ? … Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all of its alternatives. All democracies have something in common : it’s the only system of government that has ever existed in all the history of humanity where the rights of the individual are supreme and are higher than the rights of the state. In every other system, the state is supreme over the individual.
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This idea in our society and this is what makes America unique too compared to other societies that were unjust. In America, for much of its history , it has been an unjust society to huge groups of Americans. But those groups only sought inclusion under the majesty and the perfection of the idea that we are all created equal . In over 244 years, the meaning of that idea has moved to, in our shared view, mean everybody. Black people, Hispanics, gay people, every American should be free and should be equal . Martin Luther King went to the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 of 19sixty3 , he said, to collect on a promissory note, just to be included in this idea. And this is the fight. They have opted out of belief and faith in democracy that over 1,200,000 Americans have made blood sacrifices to preserve and protect over the course of our history.
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And they are doing it for a decrepit , delusional, autocratic wannabe and the terrifying thing is when you look at the 40,000 votes over 3 states that separated a Biden victory from a loss and when you look at the quarter of a percent that separated Purdue winning from a run-off, when you look at the thinness of the margin , the delusional guy is their front-runner for president in 2024. And everybody should wake up to this reality. I will tell you how he gets back on twitter, it’s the day he announces his candidacy, I will tell you how he gets back on Facebook, it’s the day that he announces his candidacy , you know what his best strategy is to inoculate himself from criminal prosecution , it’s to announce his candidacy, and he is the leader , indisputably so, and these people genuflect to his every insanity and that is the story and that is why we are not wrong to say , “Who is he saying these things to ?” The deficiency in the facts presented to the American people about the danger because of the transactional relationship and the transactional access journalism is a real danger to the country.
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Rick You know Steve that is so spot on and something that we have talked about a lot. As an institution, the press is one of the few things outlined in the first amendment of the constitution, where we give them a special set of protections under law that there is a certain trade off which should be made there , that they should be fiercely independent. And there is a cultural rot in my view in the Washington D.C. sort of media culture, not every reporter, not every person involved, but so many of them reach a certain level where it is a trade-off where they will pretend that there is normalcy where there is not. They will pretend there is sanity when there is insanity. They will pretend that there is just doing business when it is lavish corruption . I think that there are a lot of people that are inside Trump’s world that have played that system very effectively sort of in a parasitic way.
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Rick: For sure they have .
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Tara: I think that’s obvious because we saw the way that Trump was handled in the first time around when he ran. I blame a lot of the media for legitimizing him . He was a spectacle, but they gave him millions in air time, free air time right ? It was Les Mundez former head of CBS who said, “ Trump is bad for our democracy, but great for ratings .” That right there showed you, kind of, why people don’t like the mainstream media and some of the culpability. And I think that when you have stories like this, you still have some of the mistakes being made again in the way that they cover him. They need to be covering him, if this were anyone else, the way Trump behaved, they would be calling for, you know, for him to be committed or for an intervention to happen with his family members
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Rick : Baker acted
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Tara : Right, Baker acted. Like, you know there needs to be an intervention. We need to start looking at the home, but they still treat him as if he is on the same footing as former presidents. He is not. He is not. He is a twice impeached loser president who fomented a freaking violent insurrection against the United States. He is a traitor to our constitution and continues to spew vitriol and disinformation and dangerous rhetoric that is an existential threat to our country. Why doesn’t the media treat him that way ?
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Steve: Well, let me say, two things in reaction to that . And I don’t want to be ungenerous about this and I don’t mean this by way of exaggeration. Off the top of my head, and for sure we say this , for sure there will be another example or two but I don’t think there will be another three or four . I think in the four years of his presidency, who gave Donald Trump a tough interview ? Chris Wallace did it, Jonathon Swan , and Savannah Gutthrie did it. And off the top of my head , I can’t think of another person that asked him a question to get at some of the most core and fundamental issues around a range of subjects, right ? It was just wasted space where Trump man-handled the interview. And so, when you look at the totality of all of this, the reality is , I can make the argument that at this hour, despite his loss, he remains the most powerful man in America. And let me tell you why I say that. He is a man without morals or conscience and he is a man who has the power to kill with a whisper , with a word. Joe Biden won’t exercise or abuse that power , but Trump will for selfish aims. And so, we have already crossed the rubicon . We should pay attention. When our elected officials tell us around the impeachment vote that we are intimidated and afraid for our lives , wake up. We are not living in a free country any longer when the people’s representatives are intimidated , intimidated by threat with support for a candidate , when government is used as a weapon , all of these things are things that Trump did and if he should take power again in this country , we won’t have another election . There are so many lessons from the 1930s that are important . We talk about this in the culture mostly because people make stupid analogies. Steve Schwarzman goes out and says something like, “Well, my rates went up 2 percent on my taxes, now I know what it is like to be in Auschwitz “right. Morally offensive. Adolf Hitler was absolutely obsessed , obsessed, with taking power legally , legally
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Tara: That’s right.
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Steve: legally and when he did, it took six months to completely snuff out democracy and he did it with a high water mark of 37% of the vote which was achieved 2 years before he took power. The point here is in a binary system , the fear of the far left , which is what the republican strategy is in the culture war that they are waging , a message to the middle class and to the disaffected republican voters and independents , right, is that those people over here , that you voted with in this last election against Trump, they hate you, they hate your identity, they hate your family history, they’re going to take from you the things that you’ve built and you’ve earned and this is always, always the strategy , the imagined fear of the far left conjured from the thin air of the fever swamps where the autocrats dwell that gets people in a two way race to look at one extreme side that they’ve been made to be afraid of and then look for protection from the wolves in sheep’s clothing which is what Trump is. We have a dangerous situation in the country because of the inability to properly assess the danger and reality which starts with this. He’s in charge, lock, stock, and barrel of one of America’s two political parties that no longer as a functional matter believes in the American ideal, right ? And it went away in six months.
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Tara: That’s right.
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Rick: You know and I think Steve that we’ve talked about this a lot , one of the things at the Lincoln Project that we are keeping an eye on is the emergence of these nationalist populists that, you know, during Trump’s first couple of years, they pretended that we are still the same old republican party but now we have people out there like JD Vance running for US Senate in Ohio who is saying , “We are going to use the power of the state , of the nation-state, (which you and I both know is fraught with meaning) , to punish and destroy our enemies. “ That, to me, is a remarkable, the Marco Rubio thing, “We are going to force companies to do things for the good of the national order. “ I mean I guess that sounded better in the original German , but these things are an emergent threat , don’t you think ?
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Steve: Absolutely they are. What JD Vance has said that the first duty of conservatives is to oppose and if necessary to destroy , destroy , the opponents of the values and the virtues of the American nation state. Full stop. Now coming back journalistically, might that conjure someone who is celebrated on every network show from Oprah to the Today Show to be asked a question , “What do you mean by destroy ? Do you mean to kill ? Do you mean to confiscate property ? To imprison in re-education camps ? What do you mean ? What are the virtues and values of the nation-state ? Now, in the end, nation-states don’t have virtues and values, a democratic republic’s virtues and values are vested in individuals The idea that is so unique in this country , that our founders ventured into the area of what is the meaning of life ? They posited it was the pursuit of happiness. Justice in the country was everybody should get to pursue happiness, not just white, protestant, land-owning men.
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But that was a different age 244 years ago and if you look at how far we have journeyed , right, in a hundred years time, from the Tulsa Race Massacre , we should understand , that though long ago these events have occurred in the span of a single human lifetime. And our obligation is to perfect the Union. I think so many people seem to have no ability to comprehend a lot of issues of our time, yet seem to have the arrogance and perfect clarity about everything that happened 244 years ago . The reality is that the country is inherently flawed because people are flawed and it was the first country of the people, by the people , for the people. Now, though, at least I thought, we had a broad consensus in this country and we certainly have a sizeable majority that believes this is for everybody. But there is a great fight and what we have to do, if you believe in democracy, we have to win 4 elections in a row to bring this to submission. We have to win the presidential election in 24, 28, and 32. and by the next election after that, maybe it is Dwayne Johnson . Maybe it is someone else out of politics.
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Maybe it is a winner who looks at the white supremacists, the white nationalists, the people that Lindsay Graham have said that these new Trump voters that have come in, the guy with the Camp Auschwitz shirt , this whole element, the element that came to violence, well, we can’t win without them . Morally these people deserve repudiation , no political party that is standing in a coalition with them can be a moral party; in fact, standing with them is evidence already of their immorality in a democratic republic. And their embrace of conspiracies and lies is the front line of the great fight. Where is the fight ? The fight is at the place where the lie can first be met with the truth. And that’s why it is so important to talk about non-stop and forever about the insanity that has been mainstreamed in the violence that was manifested because we will not have a better warning sign. That’s it. We don’t get a better one. That’s the last one.
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Rick: The intrusion of these forces, the QAnon conspiracy people the 3 percenters, the Proud Boys, you are seeing that everywhere infect the party . You’ve got in Arizona Proud Boys being put up for state republican committee position because they want to ensure that they are going to do it. In California, what was a republican party is now running a recall effort against Gavin Newsome run by a bunch of people who have decided that being in bed with the QAnon folks, the Proud Boys , is a great strategy in California.
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Tara: Look at what happened in Huntington Beach with Tito Ortiz, the MMA guy .
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Rick: These people have spread this insanity out and they are trying to say that, well we can’t win without them, we’ve got to keep them around. This is an argument folks that doesn’t lead to a good place. Most of the people in your party can blackmail you to accept their craziness, you don’t have a party anymore, you’ve got a cult.
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Tara: Not only craziness, but lies, things that are just plainly untrue and that go completely against the constitution that you swore an oath to. That is a huge problem, but we are not going to solve the world’s problems in this block.
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Rick Wilson: One of the things that I have emphasized in the last couple of weeks is this: unless you have punishment and consequence for people who fought for a coup and that coup fails, it is just a trial run. They’ll be back. It may be this, it may be something else but they have now integrated political violence into their ethos . It will be a part of what they do and who they are going forward . It will be an era in this country that we have not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction.
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Tara: I don’t know what it’s going to take for these people to wake up.
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I think it is important to note that the republicans know that they cannot win without these people, the QAnon and other conspiracy theorists and white supremacists including Proud Boys . This is basically what Lindsay Graham said. It is important to note that they would rather try to win with the support of these people than accept potential defeat without them. I don’t think that they get these people and their numbers in the last presidential election without nominating Trump. To get them, they have to mobilize all of the rest of us who showed up in the last presidential election. In order to keep those people engaged and backing their party, they have to go so extreme that they motivate those who might not otherwise either vote or vote for Democratic Party candidates. We won on January 5 in Georgia after winning the presidential election and before the insurrection. What would have happened in the election after the insurrection ? What would have happened in a set of federal elections had they taken place right after the insurrection ? I think that they would be slaughtered in all but the reddest of states and congressional districts.
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We can’t let down our guard. They will push their culture war and fear of what they call “the Far Left” on the moderate republicans and others who joined the side of democracy in the last presidential election, but who don’t normally vote for the Democratic Party. We need to make it clear that all of our upcoming elections are democracy elections, democracy vs whatever tiny Mr. Potato Head culture war issues that they can manufacture. What is more important to these voters: democracy or Mr. Potato head ?
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We need to make it clear that the reason a majority of the members of each chamber of Congress did not vote to object to the electoral college votes which gave President Biden a majority was because they did not hold a majority in both chambers of Congress. However, if they gain control of both chambers of Congress, then this won’t hold for 2024. We need to nationalize all but the reddest of states and districts. The Republican Party is the party that opposes democracy and stands for autocracy, the big lie, the insurrection, sedition, QAnon and other conspiracy theories, and the white supremacists including the Proud Boys. That is what we must run on.
The reality is that, unfortunately, because of Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin we are unlikely to pass much more legislation in the US Congress. We have passed the American Rescue Plan and issued executive orders. So, they can’t accurately run against legislation that the Far Left passed. They opposed the American Rescue Plan and our infrastructure Plan and our democracy legislation. The economy is recovering and the nation is getting vaccinated. No legislation that is primarily supported by the Far Left can pass because of Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin. Now with most republicans, the truth would not matter. However, I am talking about the ones who voted with us on November 3 and in the Georgia run-offs. They recognized the danger Trump presented to the country. So, we have a fighting shot at keeping their vote if we run on democracy vs autocracy, sanity vs their lies, insurrection, sedition, Proud Boys and other bigots and white supremacists, QAnon and other conspiracy theorists . And with these people, truth does matter. So, we just need to keep them informed. If Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin continue to be Dixiecrats and fail to eliminate the filibuster and, thus, prevent us from passing our democracy bills, the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, then we will have to keep these moderate republicans who voted with us in the last presidential election. Normally, I would say that Republicans would have an advantage in convincing them to vote with them because they would get their news from Alex Jones and Breitbart and Trump and other extremist republicans. However, that is not the case or they would not have voted for President Biden. This means that they have some sort of rational source of news and information and a filter that doesn’t let obvious lies from republicans get through.
If we can keep these moderate republicans, then we have a realistic shot at winning the 2022 midterms.