- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's a conservative journalist and author who's a founder and former editor at large of The Bulwark and an NBC and MSNBC contributor.

He's Charlie Sykes.

This is "Overheard."

A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

(audience cheering) You really turn the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

- Cue.

- This is "Overheard."

(audience applauding) Charlie, it's great to see you.

- It's great to be back here.

- Thank you for making time to be with us.

I'm gonna start with an easy one, okay.

Who's gonna win the presidential election?

(audience laughing) - You know, I have a very bad track record with predictions here.

I think I was, like everybody else, I just assumed there was no way that Donald Trump would win in 2016.

- First time.

- Right.

I remember actually being asked by somebody, I think it was doing an interview with the BBC, and I was talking about what the Republican party would be like after the election.

And she said, "Well, what if Donald Trump wins?"

And this doesn't happen to me very often, but I was speechless for about 15 seconds.

- Couldn't conceive of it.

- I really couldn't conceive of it.

So I can't make any predictions, but I will say that it's not gonna end the fever.

It's not gonna be over.

- Right.

- It's not gonna resolve what we're going through right now.

- I love that you went to the end.

This is also my theory.

People think, okay, there's a threat to democracy.

We know what they mean by that.

But the assumption is, if the election goes one way, the threat persists, and if the election goes the other way, the threat does not persist.

I don't believe the threat ends on election day, regardless of the outcome.

- No, no, short term and long term.

I mean, short term, look, Donald Trump is never going to graciously concede that he's been defeated.

If anything, he's already laying the predicate for claiming that the election was stolen from him.

So if we think, we know what happened after 2020, think of that as kind of a rehearsal for what's gonna happen after 2024, with the added dollop of the fact that he's a desperate man, that his defeat means he not only doesn't become president, but he might be going to jail.

So being pushed into that desperate corner, I think we're gonna have a very, very difficult period after the election.

- Yeah, I agree with you, with one possible difference.

And that is, if the margin of victory for President Biden, were he to win, was so large that it was just implausible that there could have been that much fraud.

Now I know what we're talking about, and I know who we're talking about.

- The word implausible is doing a lot of work there.

- I know it is.

It's working overtime, I get that.

But, you know, Trump, the other week, was on television at a rally.

I saw a rally where was talking about, he wanted a victory on his side.

He said, "Too big to rig," this was the phrase he used.

Well, what if that happened on the other side?

Is there such a thing as too big to rig on the margin side for the current president, if he were to defeat Trump?

Maybe, maybe not.

- Well, you would think so.

- Yeah.

- You would hope so.

- Yeah.

- But then again, if we were having this conversation on January 7th, and I would tell you that, sitting here today, that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president again.

- Day after the insurrection, right.

- And that 70% of Republicans believe the election was stolen.

- Still.

- They believe all of those lies.

So we're living in a different world.

I mean, something is broken so fundamentally that it's not gonna end at the end of the election.

And by the way, when I say it doesn't end with the election, longer term, I don't think that what we're going through now is going to go away anytime soon.

- This is the new abnormal.

- This is the new abnormal.

And I think that's, this has been the illusion that I clung to for a while, that if we just got through this election, you know, the fever would break, get through the next election.

Now I think it's obvious that this is gonna be with us for decades.

It's gonna have a very, very long tail.

- Yeah.

You see the polls, I see the polls.

Pay attention to the polls now.

On the one hand, it's early.

Polls in April, as we're sitting here today, don't matter.

On the other hand, they seem to be telling a consistent story, which is that in the states that will decide the outcome of this election, it's a myth that we have a 50 state election.

I mean, it's technically true, but we really have a six state election.

In the states that matter, the polls look really good for Trump.

A lot of time left in the game.

But you see those polls.

- Sure.

- Do you believe those polls are an accurate reflection of the country's view of this race?

- I do, and I think that they're a remarkable artifact, whatever happens in this election, that at the moment when Donald Trump is facing 91 felony charges, and I wanna work this in in the first five minutes of our conversation, and has been found liable for rape by a federal judge, he is still leading in many of these polls, which tells you that there's something going on in the American electorate, the American political culture, that I'm not sure that we've gotten our heads around.

- Yeah, well, you know, he predicted this.

He said, "I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and I'd still get elected."

Turns out he was maybe right.

- Yeah.

- Right?

Because the equivalent of shooting somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue is what you just described.

And honestly, the 91 counts, to me, or felony charges, is the interesting part.

Seth Meyers, of all people, we get our news from comedians these days, right?

- TikTok.

- Seth Meyers, of all people, framed this race better than anybody has so far.

He said, "It's 81 versus 91."

He said, "It's Biden's age, 81, versus those 91 felony charges."

And ultimately the country hangs in the balance, the resolution of that 81 versus 91.

Is that right, do you think?

- Well, I think there are other factors, but yeah.

I mean, when you think about it, I mean, every conversation that I have with any voter anywhere in America, Joe Biden's age comes up.

Now maybe that will happen less and less as we go along, 'cause I do think there were a lot of Americans that were in denial because they just could not imagine, it can't be another Biden versus Trump.

We can't have these two old guys against one another.

But now I think it's settling in that, no, this is what you got.

Whatever you were hoping for, you're going to get it.

- I need to point out, by the way, it's not just two old guys, it's five old people.

Because the other three candidates, who are not the major party candidates, are all older than 70, right?

Robert F. Kennedy, Cornel West.

- That's great.

- And Jill Stein are all older than 70.

So this is not just about the two of them.

- Yeah, that's a great moment in American political history, isn't it?

You know, that this country that is this large, this vibrant, that this is what our political choice comes down to.

So I understand the, just the exhaustion that people have, the disillusionment that people have.

I mean, there feels like there's a disconnect between our politics and everything else that goes on in American life.

But if we don't get the politics right, everything else is gonna suffer as well.

And that's the unfortunate thing, is that you can't afford to be exhausted.

And for people who say, "Well, no, you know, politics can, you can screw up the politics, but what about our economy, and our education, this wonderful culture?"

Just look at the number of countries and civilizations.

What happened to the Chinese civilization?

What happened in Russia?

What happened in Germany?

What's happened, and we thought we were immune from that, that wouldn't happen to us.

And now we're surprised to find out that, you know, our fate depends on an 81-year-old guy beating somebody who has 91 felony charges.

- It occurs to me, by the way, pro tip, this is PBS, we shouldn't diss people who are old.

- Right.

- Right?

(audience laughing) - Well, okay, I'm on Social Security, so I am not doing that.

- Okay, got it.

Just checking in, okay.

Good point.

I wanna talk about President Biden.

I wanna talk about the Republican party.

So the president could say, credibly, stock market's at a huge high, unemployment rate is at a low, near historic, not historic, but you know, in the modern era, he's done as well on the unemployment rate, or on his watch, the unemployment rate has been as low as it's been at any point.

Inflation is kinda like, eh, right?

But still, you look at the Inflation Reduction Act, you look at the infrastructure bill, the investment that's been made around the country, all the things.

He's getting no credit for any of that stuff.

The polls don't matter.

He does that kind of like rope-a-dope strategy, comes out like a hail of bullets at the State of the Union.

And everyone's like, oh, he's back, he's back.

You take a look at the polls, gets no credit for that either.

Like, what's going on there?

I mean, you know, the conventional wisdom of a situation like this is, well, they have a communications problem.

They're not talking about it enough.

But they talk about it all the time.

- See, questions like this make me think that maybe we don't understand the movie we're in, or that we don't understand the rules.

Is that we've all shown up, we have this, you know, the rules of chess, and we've realized that we're at a rugby match.

- We're playing a different game.

- Or that we've, you know, shown up for the cricket match, and it turns out to be Thunderdome.

- Yeah.

- That conventional wisdom, that the economy would determine the outcome of the election, everybody.

Well, maybe we live in a world where that doesn't happen anymore.

- No longer matters.

- And there's a gap between what people say, "Are you happy about your personal life?"

People are doing well, Americans are living the dream.

And then you ask 'em, "How do you feel about the direction of the country?"

The country's going to Hell.

- Right.

- So there's a gap between that.

So what accounts for that?

I think this intense polarization, the tribalization.

The way in which we consume information has changed.

- But you make me think, if that's the case, that there's literally nothing they can do to turn this around, because if they're playing a different game.

First of all, they may not fully appreciate that.

Second of all, they may not be competent enough at that game, 'cause the guy they're playing, he is the LeBron of that game.

I mean, give him that.

He knows how to deflect, to gaslight.

He knows how to present a version of, you know, what's going on that may be divorced from reality, but it becomes the reality because he says it.

And I think that there are people like you and me who can see what's actually going on.

But I don't know that the public is gonna ultimately move off of that.

And I'm not sure the Biden campaign can change it.

- Well, I don't know either.

But look, Donald Trump wants us to think he's LeBron.

He is no LeBron.

(audience laughing) Donald Trump wants us to think of him as the apex predator, but he's not.

And I think this is part of his effective gaslighting.

Now I don't underestimate the effectiveness of Donald Trump.

And I've described it as his sort of, you know, his lizard brain instinct, that he knows what works, he knows what buttons to push.

- Right.

- But he is Donald Trump, a man who has failed at one business after another.

He's an inveterate narcissist.

He's a liar.

He is somebody who, I think, has skirted many of the rules of society, and he's gotten away with it.

It doesn't mean he will always be able to do that.

I mean, we're not talking about one of the great intellects of our time.

We're talking about a, we're talking about a gigantic man baby who cloaks himself in all this, and wants us to believe that he is this.

But I'm not sure that he.

And I think part of that, it's the mind game that he's played is like, you're never gonna outsmart this guy.

He is always gonna come up with something better.

I don't totally buy it.

- Well, if you look at the four cases, and I'll acknowledge that one of the four, as we sit here, is about to go, apparently about to go to trial.

He has managed to cheat death up to this point a lot.

And his embedded advantages.

Aileen Canon being the judge in the classified documents case.

Fannie Willis stepping in it.

Right?

- Bad.

- I mean, the guy seems to be able to get out of almost anything, and you're correct, until he can't.

- Right, and I mean, I did write an article saying, "Donald Trump may be the luckiest politician in the history of mankind."

- Right.

- Because when you think about all the things he's done, they would've been disqualifying for anybody else.

And I think that's part of what is so mind bending about all of this, is that you take virtually any single item that we've discussed and apply that to anybody else in American politics, and they would've been done, any candidate for Senate or for Congress.

We have reserved our lowest standard for the presidency of the United States.

You wouldn't tolerate that from your school's principal, from the head of the Boy Scouts.

You wouldn't hire that person to run your company.

And yet Donald Trump is able to get away with this.

So he has been, in many ways, a very, very lucky guy.

- Yeah.

- But the question is does that luck run out?

- Right.

Does our profession bear some responsibility for this, culpability for false equivalency, for both-sides-ing it, for basically saying, in response to anything that he does, "Yeah, but Hunter Biden."

- Yeah.

- I mean, I do wonder, and this is a topic that we talk about from time to time, you and I.

Are we gonna screw this up again?

Right, we did this the last time.

Last time it was, "But her emails."

- Yes.

- Right?

I mean, for a moment there it was, "But the Hur report," right?

- Yes.

- This time, I mean, in a lot of ways, we take the bait, and we create some kind of parity between these two situations.

Are we gonna screw this up again?

- I think so.

I mean, in terms of journalism.

Now again, what is the media?

Does the media exist any longer?

- Yeah, I don't know.

- I mean, the, we could spend, you know, half an hour talking about - That part, yes.

- What constitutes the media.

I mean, look what's happened in the last decade to the media.

I mean, you know this.

In terms of legacy media, we've had this massive, historic great wave that has destroyed print newspapers all across the country.

This has real consequences for the way that we consume information.

We've had the shattering of media audiences into small splinters, into little silos.

This year, you will see some of the best journalism of our lives.

And yet half the country won't hear about it or see it because they are siloed off from this journalism.

Then you have the problem, I think, of the tendency to normalize what's going on right now.

Nothing about what's happening is normal.

- But we shrug at it.

Right?

I agree.

- And if you treat, and I think what happens is the media becomes numbed and they become lulled.

And one of the great principles of the news business is you report what's new.

If it's happened 100 times, it is no longer news.

The problem is, therefore, Donald Trump will lie 100 times, will say something outrageous, will call for the death penalty for an American general, will mock Nancy Pelosi's husband for being attacked, will use the most vicious racist language, and people go, "Well, that's his shtick."

Did Joe Biden stumble coming down the plane?

So I do think, Brian Klass has written about this, he said, "There's a certain banality of crazy where people get numbed by it."

And that, what I think journalism needs to do is come to grips with what is a story.

Is it what's new, or should we evaluate on its magnitude?

What is the most important?

Because this is not a campaign like any other.

So when the media devolves into the usual horse race analysis, or let's have this flack on, you know, with their tired talking points versus this flack, let's cover the conventions the way we always cover conventions, it's like, guys, do you understand that we're not in that movie anymore?

- Haven't learned a lesson in the last couple of times.

- We have not learned, we have not learned the lesson of that, no.

- So you're not gonna vote for him?

- Oh, absolutely not.

- No.

- Will you vote for Biden?

- Yes.

- Okay.

Did you vote for Biden last time?

- Yes.

- Did you vote for Hillary Clinton the time before that?

- No.

- [Evan] But you did not vote for him?

- No, I would never vote for him, no.

- Would 1975 Charlie Sykes believe 2024 Charlie Sykes, sitting here saying, "I did not vote for the Republican candidate for president three consecutive times."

I know you were in the Young Democrats as a kid.

- Yeah.

- I know your dad ran for Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin as a Democrat.

I know that you have Democratic stirrings in your past.

But you are, to me, a conservative, full stop.

Would younger you have believed you'd say, "I did not vote for the Republican candidate three consecutive elections."

- 1975, yes, absolutely.

And I actually think about that because I think that my 1975 self was a contrarian and an independent.

And I got sucked into the, and one of the reasons I think I understand it is, I understand the pull of the partisan tribalism, where after a while it becomes us versus you, it becomes about the fight rather than anything else.

And you create these vast universes and communities around that identity.

But I've never, I'm an only child, so I've never been a joiner.

I've never been somebody who felt that my loyalty to this was to a party was anymore.

If you would've told any 1975 self that Donald Trump would be the president of the United States, - Wouldn't have believed that.

- That's the mind bending thing.

- Right.

- Not whether you'd vote for a Democrat or Republican.

That almost seems irrelevant to me.

- So the fact that he's a Republican is kind of almost incidental.

It was the Trump part and not the Republican part that got you off the stick.

That's what you're saying?

- Oh, absolutely.

- In each of these readings.

So what's happened to the Republican party that they've become the same thing?

Like, I know people from the Bush years who, when George W. Bush was, first, governor of Texas, and then was president of the United States, and people went from Texas to Washington with him, I said, "These are the most conservative people I've ever met in my entire life, period, that's it."

And now those people are being drummed out of the party.

- Yeah.

- Right?

What happened?

- Well, it's been a soul crushing experience, a disillusioning experience.

And I've asked that question for the last eight years because of course, I knew many of these people.

I mean, these were people that I'd worked with, professionally, personally.

I thought I understood what really motivated them.

But literally, what I think happened was that, at a certain point, that partisan identity became more important than any other value.

- Yep.

- And that need to belong has changed.

I mean, if you went back to 1975, you know, I was intensely involved in politics, most people here were intensely involved in politics.

We had just survived the Watergate era.

- Watergate, right, yeah, yeah.

- But I don't think that partisan identity was part of our identity.

It wasn't who we were.

We didn't build our whole identity around it and determine our relationships with our neighbors by that partisan identity.

And I think that's part of the disease that we've seen over the last eight years.

And also, we actually had a shared culture back then.

If we disagreed, we at least had the same set of facts and the same universe.

- Right, that's.

- And we no longer live in that.

- That's a huge part.

We at least started with the same foundation, - Yes.

- and then diverged from that.

- Right.

- And now we don't do that.

- Right, we don't have the same facts.

We live in different silos.

We live in different cultures.

That's one of the most difficult things about even having a conversation across these lines, is because the diversions has been so great.

And look, I think part of it was that I was naive enough to think, and I had a conversation with George Will about this right after the election, we thought that, you know, politics was about ideas, and it was about policies, and we could debate them, and go back and forth about them.

But it turns out that the intellectual veneer of conservatism was like this tiny, thin pie crust over something that was very different that we did not understand.

- Yeah.

- And I think that, that that, I think, was one of the surprises, to realize how quickly people were willing to surrender their principle in order to belong.

And I also think that we always think of people using their minds to determine what's true or not true.

When in fact, and I think people like Jonathan Haidt have written about this, in fact, I think we've been evolved to use our minds to strengthen our bond with our tribe.

So if we wanna believe something, it only takes one piece of information to make us believe that.

And I can find that on TikTok or, you know.

- Well, we live in the United States of confirmation bias, right?

- Exactly.

- We can go through our entire lives without finding a point of view that differs from the one already in our head, if we choose to.

- Right.

- And so we self exile in that little cocoon.

- Yeah.

- And not talking to people and not listening to people who challenge our ideas is really the problem here, right?

That's the poison in our democracy, is we've stopped talking to other people.

- Well, and there are other poisons in our democracy, because there's also that point at which, if we despise one another, if we have contempt for one another, we're not gonna be able to have a conversation.

And so that breakdown of respect means that there's never going to be a dialogue.

If my conversation with you begins, you know, "By the way, I think you are a racist homophobe who's probably a Nazi.

Would you like to hear my ideas about taxes?"

- Yeah, I'm not gonna want.

- No, I mean, I just don't.

- I might pass on that opportunity.

- Well exactly, so I mean, I think that's part of it.

And I think that's, we kind of have, and this is where I think Trump's lizard instinct has kicked in because he, what he has done, if you listen to him carefully, he says, "They don't hate me, they hate you."

- They hate you.

- "When they come after me, they're coming after you."

And he's convinced, you know, a lot of the electorate, they look down on you, they hate you, they don't like your values.

And he not totally wrong.

- Well, that's kind of a, it's a little LeBron-y of him.

I mean, have to, I mean, look.

What he's done is.

- I'm going with lizardy.

- He has chosen this path for himself, as a candidate for office, now three different times.

And it was an intentional decision to run this play.

He has changed, arguably broken, but at a minimum changed politics.

The arc of the universe now bends toward him, whether he ends up being successful or not.

And I have to say I hate it, but respect, he's done it.

- So I've gone back and read, reread an author that I hadn't paid that much attention to back in the mid 1980s.

You know, Neil Postman wrote the book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," where he was talking about how television was going to destroy American culture because it was going to replace, you know, people reading books with images.

It was going to dumb things down.

- Yep.

- And it seemed like an exaggeration at the time.

But his main argument was that we had been obsessed, the great threat to our culture was George Orwell in "1984," Big Brother coming in and taking our control.

And he says the real danger was identified by Aldous Huxley who said that we would entertain ourselves with trivia.

We would come to love the fact that we'd engaged in baby talk.

It would, we would, it would be the culture itself that would become so amused and entertained, it would be dumbed down.

So he was prophetic, but he had no idea how bad it was gonna get.

- Right, right.

- I mean, he, this was before the tsunami of nonsense.

But Donald Trump is really the logical progression of what he was describing, where you would have this carnival barker reality show TV figure who brings people what they really want.

You asked about Joe Biden.

Joe Biden's bringing them this policies, bringing them this debt policy, this infrastructure.

Donald Trump is bringing them the show.

And the show is, has been going on for eight years, and it's endlessly entertaining.

It's scary, but it's fun.

- Yeah.

- But it's the show.

I mean, think about the Ron DeSantis campaign.

They sat around and they thought, okay, he's a successful, popular governor of the state of Florida, I'm doing well in the polls.

You know what, if Donald Trump is indicted on multiple felony charges, people are gonna abandon him.

- We're good.

- We're good, right.

The public will get tired of this.

And I think they are as shocked as anyone to see how fundamentally the Republican party has been transformed that none of that makes a difference, that the Republican establishment just would roll over and the voters would go, okay.

So he raped a woman in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

I mean, I honestly think that it does feel like you're in a simulation.

Take everything you could say like, "Well, what will it take to break the Republicans with him?"

Well, what if he does this?

What if he does this?

And he's done them all.

What if he violated the Espionage Act?

What if he refused to leave office?

What if he inspired an insurrection against the government?

Okay, okay, that's not enough?

What if he actually called for suspending the Constitution so that he could be restored to power?

How about that?

What about, I mean, you could keep going on and on, and each and every one of them, Republicans said, "Yeah, we're okay with that," you know.

- Charlie, I need a drink.

(audience laughing) We're out of time.

God, it was great, I'm gonna put great in air quotes.

It was terrific to get to be with you, and thank you so much for helping us think differently about this election.

- It's always great talking with you.

- All right, thanks Charlie Sykes.

Thank you very much, great.

- Thank you, thank you.

(audience applauding) - [Evan] We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q and As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- There is illiberalism on the left and there's illiberalism on the right.

The illiberalism on the right, represented by Donald Trump, is the immediate emergency.

It is the heart attack.

The illiberalism on the left is serious, but we need to deal with the way we would deal with slow-growing cancer versus heart attack right now.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.

(playful flute music) (no audio)