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Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm once again joined by Trigby Olson, Senior Advisor to The Lincoln Project and President of Viking Strategies, LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs and political consulting firm. Trigby, welcome back. Thanks, Reed.
good to be back here with you all right man well it's always good to have you we have you i think every you know couple of months just to give us a check and some ground truth on what's going on so as you and i are recording this we're a day away from the big super tuesday election it's gonna be states across the country assuming that trump will on the republican side trump will win those states
and rack up more delegates. Not quite enough yet to be the quote-unquote presumptive nominee, but closer. And Nikki Haley is still in the race. The thing, you know, that we've seen so far, Trigby, though, is that, and we'll use Haley as the stand-in here even for Iowa, is that
The non-Trump vote so far, Washington, D.C., notwithstanding, because Nikki Haley won that primary over the weekend, is that he's losing somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of Republican primary voters and or caucus goers.
Some of these states, in particular, Iowa and South Carolina, these are not liberal states. These are not even moderate states. So give us a sense of how you see this stuff, why Haley's hanging around, how long you think she hangs around and what kind of effect you think she has on, let's be clear, you know, Trump's nomination. So a couple of things.
One, you know, at the Lincoln Project, we've talked since the very beginning, as you know, about the Bannon line. And as you also know, and our regular listeners and followers probably know, we have invested quite a bit in researching Bannon.
what those voters look like. And one of the things that we've discovered is they really come in two groups through some pretty sophisticated and massive analysis. One are what we call Dobbs dads and democracy first moms. They tend to be more millennial. They are more likely to be girl dads or have at least one girl than they are to have boys. And they're conservative. They're
A lot of times former Republicans, some of them still see themselves as Republicans. They have been consistently voting for Democratic candidates at the top of the ballot, particularly in key states like the governor's races last time in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania.
They currently are undecided. I don't think that they're a lot of the Republican primary voters, quite honestly, Reid, because I think they left the building. The group that I do, which is really in some ways more important, are what we call Red Dawn conservatives. They're guys like you and I, Generation X or late boomers. And, you know, Trump and MAGA is completely incongruent with the conservatism they know of Reagan and Bush when they came of age.
And I think those are the voters that we're seeing backing Nikki Haley. And if you look at Nikki's messaging, think about the things she's talking about. She is hammering Trump on some core foundational Reagan-esque conservative things. Debt and the deficit, Russia, appeasing dictators, his, you know, lack of fidelity to the Constitution.
And I think the longer she stays in the race, the bigger that problem becomes for Donald Trump. And it's why her staying in through Super Tuesday matters. It's why the Michigan primary, where she got, what, 39%, I think? It wasn't quite that high, but yeah. Because she's reminding these voters of what her brand of Reagan-esque conservatism is and how it's incongruent with Donald Trump's. And in some ways, she's playing a role...
Similar to what Liz Cheney has been doing, but she's doing it from with inside the tent while Liz has been outside. Right. And I mean, I think we've seen throughout, you know, I mean, in the last 44 years, right, what happens to candidates who don't.
solidify their own base in the primary process, right? Which is, you know, we were talking earlier today with Joe Trippi, our own Joe Trippi, about the Kennedy-Carter race in 1980. Kennedy only won five states, but it was enough to sort of shatter what was probably already a cracking Democratic coalition there. And as I noted, I was on the floor of the Republican convention in 1992 in Houston,
When Pat Buchanan gave his, you know, blood and soil speech, which effectively, you know, touched off the, you know, right wing evangelical departure from the party, at least for that moment in time. And ultimately, George H.W. Bush couldn't put it back together. And so now you have a situation where, again, if Nikki Haley goes all the way to the convention, they won't give her a speaking slot.
Frankly, I don't know that I would either. They remember what happened in 2016 when Ted Cruz got up there and gave what was, you know, an anti-Trump speech. Right. And he almost got killed literally on the floor of the convention for doing it.
I was actually there when he was giving that speech. Trump actually came down and got him booed. Like, yeah, it was crazy. And to your point, I think the one about Cheney and then you have guys, you know, are, you know, people like Adam Kinzinger or Michael Steele, friend of the Lincoln Project and, you know, former RNC chairman. Right. So the chorus of what I would call.
Non-Trump Republicans, Nikki Haley, I wouldn't call her a never Trump Republican, but non-Trump Republicans, I think, again, Trump's not going to lose the nomination. But all of this reaching critical mass right as we're about to have the sort of unofficial start of the general election, Trigby, I think creates a lot of electoral problems for Trump heading into the fall.
I was thinking as you were talking about this, how many times you and I have a conversation and you're like, well, you're really uplifting because I preach, of course, Old Testament as the joke, right? But here's the thing about Nikki Haley for those of you who are listening that are probably not liking Nikki Haley because she went to work for Trump or whatever. One of the rules that I have for fighting autocrats like Donald Trump or Putin or whoever else
This is a Stalin rule that, you know, you make alliances with who's ever on your side in the moment. And I call it the Stalin rule because Churchill and Roosevelt understood that Joseph Stalin was probably the second worst human being to ever walk the planet. But they were going up against the worst, right? For those who don't like Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley is your ally at the moment. And
You know, I'll preach a little New Testament. When you're fighting autocrats, you have to be pretty willing to give out redemption to those who are once aligning themselves with the autocrats.
And in this particular case, I don't know where that path will lead Nikki Haley. Maybe she does end up coming around and endorsing Donald Trump. Maybe she never gets the opportunity. It's pretty clear Donald Trump will never forgive her. But in this moment, she is our ally when she's raising things like debt and the deficit, or she's talking about aid to Ukraine.
She is helping weaken Trump, and she's raising issues in some cases that most of the Democratic Party and certainly Joe Biden, she's aligned with him, not with Donald Trump. So in this moment, people need to cut her a little slack.
That doesn't mean that they shouldn't trust but verify in the words of Ronald Reagan in terms of dealing with the Soviets. But for now, quite frankly, what Nikki is saying needs to be amplified as far and wide as possible because it helps build cognitive dissonance.
Yeah, exactly. And that's, as I think I've said before on the show and I've said, you know, in other arenas, like we have to play a little bit of three dimensional chess here in this moment, whether or not you, you know, would ever vote for Nikki Haley is really immaterial, whether or not she'll ever win the nomination is frankly immaterial. Right. And you could see that, you know, Trigby, a lot of the political media still like they can't get over the fact she won't get out.
And they can't sort of understand it themselves that she might actually be standing up to the guy. And not only, you know, the debt and the deficit in NATO and Ukraine, but also she goes, you know, she's going out there saying he's unhinged.
There's clearly something wrong with him. He's lost a step. And, you know, these are all things that, you know, again, at least on balance. And we'll see more tomorrow, again, on Super Tuesday, whether or not there is some resonance to this. About 30 percent of Republican primary voters who are not Republican general election voters. Again, let's remember that.
you know, are saying, yeah, I sort of like what she has going on. And it's, you know, a reminder of George W. Bush or John McCain or Mitt Romney, whoever the case might be. But again, she is doing yeoman work. And she even said over the weekend that she might actually not endorse Trump.
And I think that as this goes on, you know, what I think that could happen to Trigby is that the longer she stays in and says this stuff and puts more dents in him, I think the more crazy he will go and start saying truly horrible things about her, at which point, you know, she will again, that cycle that we've always seen with Trump will, you know, spin up and it will push again, my opinion will push more of those voters away.
first and foremost, away from Trump. And then the second piece is convincing them that, you know what, I want nothing more to do with him. I'll hold my nose one more time and vote for Biden. Right. And I mean, he's already said some pretty bad things about her. I mean, he certainly implied that her husband had left her when in reality he was on deployment, right? Like in a conflict zone. He refers to her as bird brain all the time.
You know, so he has not been being very nice to her. I'll tell you, she isn't taking it lying down. She's slugging him back. And the thing that bullies don't like is getting hit back.
So I think in this moment, she's an ally. I think, you know, for us at the Lincoln Project, as you know, we're focused on how do we make sure these Bannon line, Dobbs, Dads, Red Dawn conservatives, Democracy First moms who are conservatives and Republicans.
How do we make sure that those in states where there aren't primaries going on are hearing what she's saying? Because I don't necessarily know that they are, although I will say, and maybe you've noticed this too, it's interesting. Fox is still giving her a platform. I mean, remember that Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch, they are not, you know, I mean, Rupert might have been born in the outback of Australia, but he is a Republican, conservative American plutonium.
plutocrat. He doesn't like this guy. He never liked this guy. Trump was always a means to an end for him. It was also the reason, remember, going back almost four years now, that Rupert and Lachlan were happy to have Fox be the ones who called Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. Remember? And what the hail and fury and everything else that, you know, they suffered as a result of that. I suffer as a I'm using that as an objective word. I don't care if they suffer. Well, Starwald lost his job. And Chris is a good guy.
Yeah, but I mean, they had to sacrifice somebody on the altar of their hatred of Donald Trump. And poor Stierwald was the one that got it. But yeah, exactly. Which is they're happy to do this, right? Because...
At the end, you know, the truth is, if you think about it from the Murdoch's perspective, Trigby, just to get off on a tangent here for a second, being against Joe Biden and Democrats is a lot better for them than having to toe the line on Donald Trump for the next four plus years. Yeah, well, what did towing the line on Donald Trump cost them?
seven hundred and eighty seven million dollars so far. Right, right, right. And here's the other thing I found interesting. Did you see Malcolm Turnbull's, the former prime minister of Australia, go at Trump? Yes. Well, think about where where Rupert and Lachlan are from. And I suspect I don't I haven't asked somebody. I have somebody who could ask.
But I suspect, given the role they play in Australian politics still, that that's kind of their guy who was attacking Trump. Well, I would say, though, that, you know, Turnbull and Rob, maybe we can put a couple of clips of Turnbull in the show notes for this week. But, you know, he started a pro-democracy podcast and he's sort of
tried to be what a Republican in America, I don't know what they call them. I think they're actually the liberals in Australia, right? Yeah, they are liberals. The names are flipped there. But again, I think that I'm not under any illusions, Trigby, that this is like the resurrection, like a phoenix of the never Trump movement, right? What I think it is, though, is that, you know, one last bulwark or bastion for now is
of, you know, otherwise old line American conservatives saying, you know, we don't want this guy. We don't want this guy. And it could be the reasons you've laid out, whether or not it's the Dobbs decision, whether or not it's Ukraine and NATO, whether or not it's just like being sick of him. Right. It's just enough already. The chaos. And frankly, look, you know, look at the economics of the country. Right. The United States is booming economically, especially compared to most of our global competitors. Right. If you want a job, you can have a job.
All of the other indicators like, you know, we have this sort of national on we were going through. But, you know, the truth is, is like if you want things to be going well, you don't have a heck of a lot to complain about. And Donald Trump has to have all of that stuff fail. Right. All of it has to go down for him to be successful. Yeah. And this is classic autocrat. I was thinking about this the other day.
The autocrats constantly, and it was Putin really where I saw this the most in my work around the world because he's the big driver of autocratic moves. They want to equate democracy with chaos. That is what they try and make democracy appear to be. And Donald Trump is doing the exact same thing. He's constantly trying to make democracy.
chaos. And then his autocratic play is the answer to the chaos is his strongman. In fact, you and Ruth were talking about that not long ago, right? That is the modus operandi of strongmen and autocrats. Create chaos and be the answer to the chaos. And that is Donald Trump times a thousand.
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I guess let me say this, is that yes, as we have discussed, that yes, that's what autocrats want to do, is they want to create the chaos and then quote unquote be the answer to it. The problem I think Trump has is that he's the creator or the progenitor of chaos, but he can't help himself. He wants to create more. Yeah, I think that's true. I'm not saying Donald Trump is very good at the autocrat game either. He really isn't, quite frankly. You know, as somebody who's involved in lots of colored revolutions,
granted, where people were peacefully and rightfully protesting elections that were stolen, they weren't very good at that. Now, that said, we all missed the boat. And I'm not saying us at the Lincoln Project, but we as Americans didn't take what happened on January 6th as all the warning signs were there. We didn't take it as serious as we needed to. And you and I talk about from time to time, early September,
When I got out to Park City in 2020, you know, we sat around and had a conversation about he's not going to concede and where it could lead. And I've said this before when I made, you know, when I got asked, well, what could he do? When I said he could hold a mega rally and storm buildings and I chuckled about it, as you'll recall.
You know, even with all that experience around the world, I didn't see it coming. I will tell you this, what I worry about and what we all need to be prepared for. We have to beat them at the ballot box on November 5th, but we have to be ready for November 6th to the 20th. And we have to be ready, quite frankly, for what could be a incredibly bumpy election.
Period from now through the election, we're already seeing it. I can't believe it's only March of an election year and tensions are as high as they are. This is like October level. But the flip side of that, too, though, Trigby, is that talking to a bunch of reporters last week.
is they all seem incredibly bored with the whole thing. So, oh, do you want me on a rant, Reed? Yes, go! All right. For reporters who are listening to this thing, you need to wake up. You need to understand the game that we're in, not the game that you know. I get at elite journalism schools,
At Columbia or Northwestern or wherever you're going, right, I get you haven't been very well equipped for the game that we're in. But the game we're in is one between autocrats and people who want to see democracy take hold. This isn't about what's happening in the primary. And you're taking the shiny object every time you write stories about process.
Every time Susie Wiles and Chris Lasavita get you to talk about what's happening with the process rather than the bigger picture of what's at stake in this election, whether that's talking about age or who misspoke or any of that, you're playing the game that you know, and that works to Donald Trump's advantage because he isn't playing that game. And the irony is that,
You are going to be the first ones that they go after if they come back to power. They literally will go straight at you. And the people who own the big media companies need to understand how that game ends up unfolding. And it unfolds because in
You know, NBCUniversal, suddenly Universal is being approached and saying, hey, you know what? Chris Ruddy's buying you out. No, by the way, he's paying three cents on the dollar for your shares. And if you don't, you're going to go to jail for tax evasion because we found these misconstrued things.
Right. Or the FCC is going to pull your license. Right. Exactly. And he's already saying what he's going to do. Look, I mean, this is exactly the kind of thing that's happened a century ago. Right. 90 years ago. Trigby.
And to your point about, you know, most elite media in this country went to elite institutions. Very few of the types that, you know, work their way up from copy boy. Right. Or, you know, gopher or whatever, you know, to the they got a chance to be in the metro desk and then they work their way up and they work their way up. And so they'd seen every rung of the ladder and they had sort of this belief in the institution, the fourth estate of the media and the media came first, not to say that it was ever perfect.
But now it's like, yeah, well, you know, we got to cover it this way. I think that in some ways, a lot of these big outlets, you know, take your pick are really just oversized clickbait machines. Right. You put good stuff about Donald Trump, you know, on the front page. Angry Democrats click on it. You put bad stuff about Joe Biden on the front page. You know, angry Democrats and gleeful Republicans click on it.
Right. Like this stuff isn't a secret. There's a reason why, you know, this last week, the survey that The New York Times did, why did they push the hell out of it? Because they needed to make news and they wrote like six different stories on their own poll. And so I think we should also just understand that the environment that, you know, political and frankly, every other kind of media is now operating in is I got to do everything I can to keep eyeballs coming to my Web page.
Or my app or whatever it is and whatever it is I got to do is what I'm going to do. And we know that, you know, Trump drives eyeballs always has. Right. I mean, was it who was it? Less Moonves. Remember, he said Trump might be bad for the country, but he's good for CBS. Like the ethos is probably further down the road because they need something like that. Well, I think that's part of it.
I had a conversation six weeks, a month ago with a really prominent journalist. You would know the person. And we were going round and round and I was kind of going on that rant and they were saying to me how hard it is. You know, they're like, well, it's really hard being a journalist, political journalist in the age of Trump.
And I finally said to the person, I'm like, you know, that might be true, but I used to work with the Belarusian Association of Journalists. They won a Nobel Peace Prize, I think it was, or some kind of major prize. Maybe it's the European Union's award. I'm like, you know, Belarusian journalists, Russian journalists, they have it hard. You don't have it hard right now.
Right. No one's going to come and beat you up and throw you in jail in the middle of the night for writing a story that tells the truth about what Donald Trump's aims are. Where's the story about how often he has said, I'm going to impose the Insurrection Act on day one? Where are the stories?
There aren't. Right. And you know what? I was having a conversation with a national reporter last week, and it was all about the lawsuits are all bogus. And, you know, the stuff in New York and E. Jean Carroll and the documents and, you know, now Fannie Willis and everything else. And I'm like, well, look.
I'm a partisan. It's not my job to be objective. My job is to say why Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and to the globe and should never be within, you know, 100 miles of the White House again. Your job is not to be objective necessarily, but to tell the truth.
And that necessarily might not be objective in the case of someone like Donald Trump. But this is the other part, too. And I think this is something we need to remind ourselves of. He's like Donald Trump is singularly responsible for all of the trouble he's in. Nobody else did this to him. To your point, right before we started recording, you said, did you see now he's calling himself a martyr? Like he did all these things. Right. E. Jean Carroll, the fraud in New York, scams.
stealing documents, inciting a riot, RICO charges like he did these things. He was the singular person who made all this stuff happen. And so the idea that you're like, well, look, it might push some voters away. And so we're going to you know, we're going to sort of cover it as like BS, like again, to your point, that's the easy stuff to cover. And
And it keeps the channel open to the Trump campaign. But the truth is they're going to tell you everything anyway, whether Trump's going to tell you somebody's going to leak, right? Like the Trump White House was the most transparent in history, not because they were open about everything, but because none of them could keep their damn mouths shut. That's not that much different now. Everybody wants to be talking to somebody. And so I think it's one of those where, to your point, it's like, what is this election about? Right.
They think that this election is about Joe Biden's age and Donald Trump's trials. Right. Literal and figurative. That's not what the campaign is about. Right. But delving into and I think they I think they infantilize their readership. Right. By not delving into the kinds of issues that you're talking about, which is like, what does it mean? Like do an explainer on the Insurrection Act. What does it mean?
Do an explainer. Right. And just for the listening audience, I've got a bunch of information on this project 2025 that I have to read and I want to really get my homework done. But we'll do a series on that. Talk about what it means to have, quote unquote, Schedule F employees right in the federal government, which look, I was a Schedule C, a political appointee. Right. That's the lowest level political appointee you can be.
And now this schedule F thing means they're going to get rid of, you know, civil service, you know, people, bureaucrats. Look, I'm no fan of bureaucracy, but I don't think people should be tossed out on their asses either for no reason to be replaced by people who are ideologically in line, because that's the other part. Trigby is that this next Trump administration is not about the good of the country, but driving ideological aims around.
of Christian evangelicals, wingnuts like Steve Bannon, wingnuts like Stephen Miller. That's the role of government in their minds, which is get rid of all the things that can help people and bolster all the things that can control people. Yeah, 100%. Have you ever read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shire? Of course. Okay. So, you know, he wrote another book called Berlin Diaries, which is basically his diaries from Berlin as he was reporting.
Was he half-assing it the way in his reporting from Berlin, the way that these people are half-assing it? Like, if you want to be a great journalist when you're facing and seeing something like what we're seeing today, you have to stand up and understand what you're really seeing, not what you're being told. And I just think...
We have a whole generation of reporters who are busy both-siding stuff and trying to get both sides. It's sort of like in Ukraine when Tucker Carlson did this with his interview with Putin. Well, I mean...
You know, the Nazis had to invade Poland. I had to invade Ukraine. Right. And I think here's the other piece of the story. You have the campaign, which is part of the game, you know, and in a normal campaign, you probably let, you know, I don't know, when you were on George W. Bush's campaign, right? Like if he misspoke, Karen Hughes or Carl or somebody would be responsible for kind of cleaning it up.
This isn't normal in that same way. If Donald Trump says it repeatedly five or six times, letting Chris LaCivita or Susie Wilds, quote, clean up the mess.
you got to take it for what he's saying. I think the other thing is that people need to understand in terms of the game we're in is what it means. You know, one of the first times I came on with the podcast with you, we were talking about not wanting our daughters. You'd said, I don't think either of us wants our daughters to grow up in an America without democracy. And I said,
Yeah, it's that. But we don't want them growing up in a world without American democracy or where American democracy is questioned. American democracy is being questioned all around the world. And we can deny it. We can pretend it isn't happening.
when we make a promise to Ukraine that we're going to provide aid. Now, suddenly we're not providing aid when NATO is being called into question. If Donald Trump comes back, I'll tell you what kind of a world we're going to see. Radek Sikorski, who's the foreign minister of Poland, somebody you and I both know, recently came out. Poland's going to build nuclear weapons. Germany probably will build. You're going to see nuclear proliferation. You're going to see Putin
busting moves on places. You're going to see Xi making a move for Taiwan because you are talking about one of the greatest up endings of the world as it has been known and the chaos that will ensue because of the shining city on a hill to use a Reagan ism. No longer being will be a world that people are going to come to regret and
And I keep wondering, I think about somebody we both know, a couple of them who are appeasers, who have young sons. And I was talking to one of them and they were like kind of trying to downplay what it meant. And I thought, I wonder if they're going to feel the same way when that chaos is raining down and their kids are going to have to be like the kids in Band of Brothers.
To your point, I want to, to Sikorsky, I want to add French President Emmanuel Macron from last week, and this is from Ukrainska Pravda. Quote, French President Emmanuel Macron has said that European nations should not wait for the results of the U.S. presidential election to decide whether to reinforce their own military capabilities and that of Ukraine, but should act now. So what, you know, if Macron is a leader, I think as it
Was it Schultz in Germany? Now we have a new government in Poland. You and I have talked about the prime minister of Estonia, Kacik Halas, who is freaking awesome. And then, of course, you've got Zelensky literally still on the front lines. Like there are plenty of people
pro-democracy standard bearers here going, you know, because remember, as I've said before, like two years ago when Russia invaded, Europe looked back and Joe Biden said, I'm here. But now we're in a point where, again, it's going to be an inflection point. You're absolutely right, which is come November, the Europeans don't want to have to wait another seven months to wait around for whether or not we've got our act together as the leader of the free world. And that in and of itself, Trigby, is a pretty sad state of affairs.
Right. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. And let me just say this to bring it a little bit back to the electoral politics of it, which is all of the things that Trump and co are supportive of or the people that they support.
are unpopular broadly with the American people, not just with Democrats and independents, but also with Republicans. If a free vote could be taken on Ukraine in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, it would pass overwhelmingly. I talked to somebody who's intimately involved in that on the Hill. Seventy five. Twenty five would be the margins. It's not even close. Right. And so that's why you see now a couple of, you know, there's at least one Republican member of the U.S. House who said he's going to do some sort of
maneuver, discharge petition to get the thing to the floor. My guess is, is that Johnson very well might let that go because he's not very good at this and doesn't really want to be in the middle of it. Right. He'd frankly rather lay the blame at someone else's feet. But again, this is what we're talking about. And you and I were talking about this a little bit earlier this morning, which is historically. Right. I'm going to take it from the broad macro political perspective. But then I want you to take the mechanical, which is when these kinds of
fascists take over, right? What is it? It's an energy, a hyper energized, nationalized, right. An apathetic middle and a feckless left. It looks an awful lot like that in some cases, Trigby, but you mentioned something about legislatures and courts too. So, so give us, give the listeners a little bit on that. Yeah. So I made the point on Twitter, you know, pretty much everywhere that I've worked around the world where democracies failed, uh,
The legislative branch and the judicial branch have had the opportunity to end it before it takes off.
And inevitably, in the places where democracy has failed, they don't take their shot. And we've kind of seen that. We saw it with Mitch McConnell. I'm sure that McConnell today regrets that he didn't encourage everybody to remove Donald Trump. And there were people in his orbit saying that he should make that move.
They made a decision in the game they know, which is you'll never be majority leader again if you do that, his political people. And so they didn't because they wanted to have, as one of them said, we can have Trump's governing coalition without the insanity. They actually believe that. And what's the harm in humoring him? Right. What's the harm in humoring him? And so they let it go, thinking that somebody else would stand up and take care of it. The courts will take care of it.
Now, did the courts rule wrong in the Colorado case? I don't know the answer to that. I don't even pretend to know. It seems like if the Supreme Court ruled nine to nothing with the Supreme Court we have, it probably means they made the right decision. That said, though.
Every single place, the other branches fail. And at the end of the day, the only thing that's going to stop this guy is the American voters. And that means every single one of us needs to follow what I use as rule number seven. And I used to say this. I can't believe I'm saying it to Americans. I used to say it to Belarusians and Russians and Ukrainians and Burmese and Venezuelans and all these other people.
You have to wake up. Each one of us has to wake up and say, what do skills and what can I do today to attack that vertical structure?
of Donald Trump and his allies that want to take away my democracy. And every single one of us is going to answer that question a little different, what we have that we can do. For some, it may be talking to your next door neighbor. For others, you know, it might be going on Reed Galen and the Lincoln Project's podcast or whatever it is that people can do, big or little, you have to wake up every day and say, what can I do to try and stop this? And
Well,
Well, and and if we don't and I wrote about this over the weekend on my sub stack at the home front, go check it out, which is we saw last week, you know, Muscovites turning out by the thousands, Trigby, to honor the now late murdered.
fallen Alexei Navalny. And they did so knowing that they were putting themselves at great personal risk. I assume that any one of those people who turned out has been identified, right, and is now on a list if they weren't previously. But I saw that as both a reminder of what happens when
people don't stand up when they have the opportunity, but also looking forward, which is, you know, how many journalists, how many pro-democracy activists, right? How many others will be imprisoned or worse, far worse, and brave Americans will have to come march at their funerals. And I think that's the kind of thing we don't want. And as you know, because I believe that you were friends with Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in front of the Kremlin, going back to something you were saying about journalists, I mean,
Putin is a homicidal. He's a genocidal thug, but he's a homicidal maniac. I mean, they go out and they kill all their opponents. And frankly, it doesn't even matter where they are anymore. Right. It doesn't have to be within the confines of Russia. They'll do it anywhere. Yeah, that is what they do. And honestly, like all these people who are saying, oh, and we know a ton of them in Republican politics. We know a lot of journalists, all these people who are saying, oh, it's so hard to
You know, to do this, screw your courage to the sticking place. You know, if you say somebody else will take care of this, you're aiding and abetting. And to be honest, like as Mitch McConnell's legacy gets crafted, and as you know, I used to work for him.
McConnell woke up on whatever day it was that they decided that they weren't going to press forward and he wasn't going to impeach Trump. And he didn't do everything in his power that he could do to end this. And that will end up being his legacy. That's how history will judge him. That was his historic moment. As you know, I wrote a memo one time that you ended up being one of the people who received it where I talked about lequilenza, right? Like,
Like Valencia was a welder who climbed a fence when no one else wanted to climb the fence. At the end of the day, I met Valencia, right? Like, and ended up setting off a fire and became world famous for doing it. Boris Yeltsin was a drunk who got on a tank and only because he was probably drunk, did he get on the tank, but somebody needed to get on the tank. He got on the tank, right? Like,
Everybody has to wake up each day and say, what can I bring to this? And what can I do today to try and change things? And that is where we're at. And we've said this before, and guys, it bears repeating. There are more of us than there are of them, but only if, as Trigby said, we all do what we have to do. And frankly, that's...
That in November, we all show up and do what we need to do, which is vote for Joe Biden. Again, I'm not a Democrat. Trigby is not a Democrat. We've never been Democrats. I don't think we're going to be Democrats. But in this moment, Joe Biden is the only option. And it's not I mean, there's not a second close one. It's not like, well, I like Joe Biden, you know, 70 percent of the time and Trump's fine. 30 percent of the time. Like, that's not the world. That's not the universe. Like it's it is it is a binary choice. It is black and white. And I know that.
You're going to hear a lot of people like, you know, people that talk like that, Trigby, you know, they're, you know, that's dangerous. That's dangerous kind of talk. That's, you know, it doesn't leave any options for compromise or anything like that. But in this in this moment, I first of all, we're we're not legislators. Right. That's not our job. Right. If we were crafting some new piece of policy, like let's haggle all we need to. That's not what this is.
This is on November 5th. Is our guy going to win or is our guy going to lose? And if our guy wins, then, you know, it is I think then Biden truly will be that bridge to the future. He will be certainly the last silent generation president and almost assuredly the last baby boomer president. And, you know, we will probably pass through literally and figuratively, Trigby, what we have all thought of, those of us of a certain age, as sort of the postwar era.
Right. And we will now be in a new political and historical epic. But what that era and epic look like.
is only up to us if we win now, because if we don't win now, eventually, I think that the bad guys will lose out because they tend to burn themselves up quickly. The problem is, is that they burn up hundreds of thousands or millions along with them. This is the thing at the end of the day, Reid, like you make such a good point on democracy. There is no compromise on the Constitution. There is no compromise. And that is ultimately what this election is about on democracy.
That you have to set aside what you want for tax policy and what you prefer for foreign policy. All that has to be set aside because in the game we're in, it's zero sum. Either democracy wins or autocracy wins. That's the choice between Biden and Trump. And they will constantly try and make it about a million other things. They will constantly try and make mutual equivalence
But there is no compromise between those two things at the end of the day. We are going to be one or the other. It is an either or proposition. Yeah, exactly. And again, as we have said before, and a lot of this stuff, guys, not only bears repeating, but also bears sharing. When people like Donald Trump and his minions and goons say things, believe them. They mean them. They have faced no sanctions.
So far, no sanction for saying or doing any of the things they've said and done. You know, have several hundred people who literally individually stormed the Capitol gone to prison? Yes.
and they were judged guilty and they are suffering the consequences for it. But the people who planned this stuff, the people who carry this stuff out, the people who aided and abetted it, who are the spiritual leaders of this, you know, the Jenny Thomas's of the world, right? They have faced no consequence. And the consequence that's worse for them is not only a Donald Trump defeat, but a Donald Trump crushing in November, because that is the only way to start to
carve away all of this ugliness that we're staring down the barrel of, hopefully not literally, in the course of the next eight months. All right, Trigvy, before I let you go, what else are you looking at that our listeners and viewers, if you're out there, should be taking a look at?
I will say, as you know, Reid, I've been on a little tour of what we call the existential states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona. There's a lot of polling out about those states, and the polling shows whatever the polling shows depends on the poll. I will say, I feel after being in those states, a little more optimistic about where this is headed. If
things people are willing to set aside differences and make this about the real choice that they have, which is either or. I will say, you know, there is the Democratic Party and Republicans of conscience, these Dobbs, Dads and Red Dawns in these states, you know, Biden can get there with those voters. I think, though, the other piece that's out there on the Democratic side is
There's got to be some real soul-searching by those people on the left. They're going to have to get their people out. I believe that ultimately the base of the Democratic Party has got a real choice and they need to have an honest reckoning looking in the mirror. But that said...
I was kind of negative about what the prospects were of Biden repeating in Arizona. I think Biden actually is kind of a coin flip. I think Wisconsin is always going to be 10 or 15,000 votes. We got to get out every day and figure out where we're going to find those 10 or 15,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona.
Well, amen to that, my friend. And as always, thanks for joining us. Before we let you go, where can our listeners find you on social media if you dare to tread? Absolutely.
at trig v t r y g v e olson o l s o n on twitter absolutely as always gang you can find me on twitter and tiktok at reed galen on threads and instagram at reed underscore galen underscore lp and over at substack the home front i hope you will join me trig v olson thanks for everything thanks for joining me thanks for all your work ah thank you reed uh working with you has been fantastic
Amen, brother. And everybody else, we'll see you next time. Thanks again to everyone for listening. Be sure to follow and subscribe to The Lincoln Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or however you listen. Don't forget to leave a five-star review.
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