YouSaid · the spoken record

Jonah Goldberg

lines on the record: 77
first: 2018-10-25
most recent: 2018-10-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But if you have a 16 person primary the way we did, you're going to have the same collective action problems that we did.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. No, and I thought Michelle Bomba's statements were good on that. And everybody is sort of trying to be Michael Avenati.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you say the ends justify the means very quickly, the means become ends in themselves. And you start having all this stuff, like it's worth it just to own the libs, or their tears are delicious, that kind of stuff, right? And so this is part of the corrupting thing that's happening on the left now is there is this sort of invisible primary to be the most pugnacious to fight back. And so you had Hillary Clinton saying you can't be civil anymore.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Welcome to My World. I've been arguing that, you know. That one of the problems which I'm partly a contributor to and I serve as blame for is this obsession with what I call Staulinsky envy on the right. The right has convinced itself of this story that all you guys did their march through the institutions, you took over everything because you internalized you treated Saulensky like he was your Sun Tzu, right? And I think that's overstated to be, to say the least, right? I'm not saying Saul Lenski didn't have any impact, but come on. And so this narrative gets absorbed on the right that says, you guys cheat so much, we have to use the same tactics. And so one of the really corrupting things that's been going on on the right. I think it happens on the left too, but obviously I have a fiduciary role on the right.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They aren't treating the norms right, so we're going to use norms as weapons too. And people want the other, it's sort of like the version of free speech for me, but not for thee. Norms for thee, but not for me. Everyone wants the other sides to be constrained by norms, but not them.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mike Pence gives an interview. And after he gets through the obligatory saluting Donald Trump and his broad shouldered leadership, he does this thing where he says how disappointed he is that someone in the administration would be violating this norm. And I think it's bad that someone violated that norm. I would have been outrageous as someone in the Obama administration did it. But then when he was asked about, well, what about Trump doing X? He says, well, look, Trump was elected to be a disruptor. And so the argument ends up being on both sides now, like with Corey Booker's almost Spartacus moment thing, right? The argument is”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I agree. And I think what people don't really realize is it's not so much that people are destroying norms. They're weaponizing them. And so, I mean, I remember when the anonymous New York Times piece came out, right?”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, I understand that. But if liberals really don't care about states, let's break up California into three or four states.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Congress that are directly elected by the people and a representative of the people, then you basically have to get rid of states. And I wish people would just make that argument. I also think that a lot of this is a function of the fact that California is so big and so democratic that it skews everything. The other top 10 really populated states tend to be, with the exception, I think, of New York, tend to be kind of swing states.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, again, my favorite political institution of the three branches is probably the Supreme Court. It's the least democratic one. Because what its job is to do is to defend individual rights as enshrined in the Constitution. It does other things, but that's the part I like about it. That's anti-majoritarian, right? I don't care if the entire country votes that I don't have the right to free speech. I still have the right to free speech, right? And so... We want to get rid of two houses of”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so the senators represent, or supposed to represent states. Think the part of the problem is that there are a lot of people on the left side of the aisle who haven't figured out what they think of states. If we're going to have states and we're going to have this set up in the Constitution that states get represented as states and that there are state interests and that states are sovereign and that's where 95% of criminal law is, all that kind of thing, if we're going to say states are real political entities, then we're going to have to live with all sorts of consequences of that. That means that the Senate is not going to be perfectly diversely representative of the people. That means frankly.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so my colleague at AEI, Norm Ornstein, talks and writes about all this. Think it could lead to a real problem. I'm unmoved by a lot of this. I'll just say the calls for the claims that the Senate is undemocratic, there's a category error embedded in that. The Senate's democratic in the sense that in each state people democratically vote for their senators.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so part of the problem is a lot of conservatives have priced all of this in and they've gone numb to the bad side of it. And look, I spend an enormous amount of time talking about how Trump is corrupt into conservatives and how I ask Republicans and conservatives all the time, what could a future Democratic president do that you won't be a hypocrite for criticizing. And it's very rare to get anything like remotely a good answer on that. But at the same time, I do think that the mainstream media, the left, they don't understand that Trump is having a corrupting effect on them too.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's it like when you talk about trade deficits? He simultaneously says trade deficits are terrible, but he loves all this direct foreign investment. Direct foreign investment is literally the other side of the coin of a trade deficit because those dollars got to come back. He doesn't understand a lot of these things. He just says things, and that's”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, assassinations. Today you get people freaking out because some idiot knocks a MAGA hat off a kid in a diner and it becomes this source of just incredible rage. Imagine what happens when you actually have real political violence starting to be magnified and circulated through social media. It really concerns me because it does feel like the demand for ever greater violence is It's not far away and it's a real concern of mine on both with the antifa crowd and also with the proud boy whatever those jackasses are called”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's amazing if you just think about the 1960s were vastly more violent than right now, right? I mean, in terms of political violence. You just look at the number of bombings in California from 68 to 70, and it was just astounding.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is true now. And so one of the first things you've got to do in politics is identify the problem. And so I think you're absolutely right that populism as a sort of a political market signal of anger is instructive and that you should listen to what people are angry about because most people tend to be angry about things for a good reason. One of the problems that we have today is people are getting angry about things for bad reasons. And social media and Facebook and Twitter, they're making all of that worse.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's absolutely right. And I think there are an enormous number of problems we have in our culture and our politics that are way upstream of Washington. And this economic one is one. You know, Ben Sass has been making this point for a while now that all of the scapegoating of immigrants for stealing these jobs, most of these, you know, industrial jobs haven't been lost from outsourcing and they haven't been lost to immigrants. They've been lost to robots.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right reason and facts and evidence, we can persuade people That this is the way to go, and that's not the way to go. Populism says, shut up and get with the program.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is inherently anti intellectual. I'm not saying that intellectuals can't use populism for intellectual ends, and that's what politicians often do. But my favorite statement on populism comes from William Jennings Bryan, where he said, the people of Nebraska are for free silver, therefore I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later. And populism, I would argue other people have argued this as well is fundamentally a form of identity politics. It is saying that we're the good people and our people are good because our will and our commitment to our cause says we're good. And the people who disagree with us are the bad people. And I don't think that's how democracy is supposed to work. Democracy is supposed to be about disagreement. It's supposed to be about argument, right? That's the good stuff that comes out of the Enlightenment is this idea that enlisting reason or”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the system, as it were, and those rules serve as a barrier to entry. And it's a problem. And technology is a problem. And one of the, I've changed my mind about a lot of these things. I'm become a big fan of Joseph Schumpeter, who predicted capitalism was doomed in part for the kind of reasons that you're talking about, that the economic dislocations that it causes and the relentless rational efficiency that it has, that it goes after institutions that make capitalism possible, right? Because capitalism depends on what Schrumpeter calls extra rational institutions that cannot be created by capitalism and cannot be restored by capitalism once lost, you know, the family is the best example. But the problem with populism is that, look, I come from a conservative tradition that generally just doesn't like enthusiasm of any kind.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Absolutely. I don't think that populism is the answer, though, right? I mean, on the policy side, I'm a big believer, and I try to make this point all the time, that complexity is a subsidy, that the more complex you make society, the more complex you make the rules, the more you're rewarding people who either have the cognitive capital, the social capital, the political capital, the economic capital to navigate around them. If you've got 10 lawyers on staff, there's pretty much no regulation that's going to be a real problem for you. If you are locked out,”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's ironic this week, Mitch McConnell said in an interview that he doesn't think one party can solve entitlements Anymore. And I think that's probably, I think that's been true for a very long time. But it's interesting to hear him say it now, you know?”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The lesson those guys took from that was we can vote against the president with 70% approval ratings and win politically because of it. And everyone sort of doubled down on their partisan positions after that.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know some of the Republicans on the House side from back in that stimulus fight. And this is an analytical point that for whatever the reason, and I don't care about the blame game at this point, the Republicans felt There were Republicans during that stimulus thing that were terrified that the deal was going to be such that a third of the Republicans were going to have to vote for it. And if that happened, that would have made... Basically, Obama economic agenda in the first term, a bipartisan thing. And for whatever reason, and I'm sure you have strong views as you were there about it, Eric Cantor in that crowd came to the conclusion that they had to vote unanimously against it. And the lesson that they took from that, whether that was the right policy move, whatever, that's a different point.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As long as you're willing to acknowledge that any approach has costs and benefits, I'm willing to have an argument. There are no panaceas to it as far as I'm concerned.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the lesson there should be this is the kind of thing that happens when you can push these things legally. And so I'm very much a believer in the treatment model. Like sending my brother to jail would not have been a great idea for anybody. The people who, either sort of this Randian model, we are all just the captains of ourselves and that we have no social solidarity with anybody whatsoever of drug legalization, I just find more heartless than people realize. At the same time, I find this lock them up. They're all criminals approach to be grotesque as well. I think these problems need to, you know, I would not legalize harden our addictive narcotics, but And I very much favor sort of where a treatment based approach.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The glib arguments for drug legalization really, really annoy me. I'm not talking about weed. Pot's a different thing. But if you're talking about heroin and that kind of stuff You have to acknowledge that if you make it like any other product and you allow Procter& Gamble and Glaxo Smith Klein Beacham to market heroin and maybe even advertise for heroin, you're going to have a lot more drug addicts. And a lot of those people are going to be enslaved to it for the rest of their lives and they're going to die from it. And that doesn't mean you have to be, I'm not Jeff Sessions either, but I'm very much in favor of”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I always ask my colleagues if the drug war worked, would you be in favor? We'd be in favor of it. And it gets interesting responses because the assumptions it just doesn't work. I am off the reservation about drug legalization from a lot of my libertarian. I've become more libertarian over the years, but... The problem is that the libertarian model for drug legalization assumes that we are all rational actors. And the problem is that there is an irreducible number, you can call it trivial or you can call it significant. It depends on how you want to define these things. But there are some number, somewhere between 1% and 10% of people who can no longer be rational actors once they try some of these things even once. Anybody who has seen what serious drug addiction does not just to the person, but the people around them.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was terrible in all the normal ways and terrible in some special ones because just to correct the record, he had a drug problem, but he died because he was altered and messed up and he fell down a flight of stairs and hit his head. And I had to come home from a junket in Israel. Be the one to pull the plug. I will forever Despise the medical team at the hospital that was in charge of all of this because they gave him no sedations and we pulled the plug. He literally his eyes open, he sat up. It was horrifying. And I don't need to dwell on it, but it's just one of these things that... Know it's an image you can't get out of your head. Yeah, so look, National Review has been against the drug war for 20 years, something like that, a little longer.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About six months of doing weird posts for the site following the impeachment stuff and whatnot, I started writing this thing called the Goldberg file, which is kind of right today. And it was one of the first political blogs. It was before the word blog came out. It got pretty popular. It's about six, eight months later, they asked me whether I wanted to be the editor of this new sister publication called National Review Online, where we're going to start an actual magazine. So I was the founding editor of National Review Online. I did that for... Several years as sort of the hands on person. And so I've been at National Review now coming up on 20 years”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should enlarge Congress dramatically. It would fix all the gerrymandering problems and all sorts of other stuff. And so I wrote for commentary, for the public interest, all that kind of stuff during the 90s. And then it turns out that it's probably not a great idea to be involved in a perceived conspiracy against Democratic president while you're working for PBS. And so National Review had just taken over made Rich Lowry the editor. I had written for National Review before as a freelancer. Moved over there as a contributing editor. And then in the early, I'm one of the first. In internet years, I'm Methuselah. I've been doing this for a very long time. And I...”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, self-taught demographer and former Lyndon Johnson speechwriters. He was proud that he was called Reagan's favorite Democrat. And so I ended up being a research assistant for Wattenberg, who was a syndicated columnist, and I did freelance writing on the side throughout the 90s. I then became a television producer for PBS. I produced his TV show and some other stuff. And so one of my frustrations when the Lewinsky thing happened is that, you know, to this day, there are still people out there who say, you know, you're just famous because all that. I certainly got a lot more exposure because all that. But my first op-ed, first one I ever submitted for writing. Was on the day after the election in the Wall Street Journal in 1992. And it was on this argument that I want to return to about why we should make Congress.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly back then, it was really a great time to be there. This was like 91, 92. Yeah. And, um, A girlfriend at the time was going to AU law school and I was hanging out with her in Washington and I did an informational, I was just doing weird interviews around. I landed a paid internship for Ben Wattenberg at the American Enterprises Institute. And with the deal being that I would replace.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I did know that. So fast forward after college. I went to Prague and I taught English and I went there to be a starving writer. I sort of batted 500. I didn't starve and I didn't write. But I had a fantastic time. I came home.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I wanted to be a writer almost all of my life, but I wanted to write science fiction and comic books. And one day when I get enough FU money, I may give that a try. So when I got to college, I discovered that I was much more just politically fluent than a lot of other people because my dad subscribed to 13 newspapers at home and 27 magazines because he was in the syndication business. And I was just, I was marinated in that stuff. And, um... And so there's a phenomenon that happens at every single sex school that goes co-ed is that when Vassar took in men, men rushed to become the first editor of the newspaper, get into student government because they want to be sort of pioneers by selection bias. So I did a lot of that, and I jumped into all that stuff.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and he thinks his base are the best people and they're the real Americans. And that's what I hate about historically populism always uses the language of talking about all the people, just means peopleism from the Latin, right? But in reality, the history of populism is that you think your people are the good and legitimate people, and anybody who's opposed to them or to you are bad or treacherous or whatever. Donald Trump, he says stuff that normally you would just have, you know, you would need Maureen down to write a column speculating about what's in his head. And he just, he says it, you know, about my people are the best people. My people are good people, you know.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Obama, and I've changed my mind about some of them while working on the book, I quote Barack Obama favorably a few places. I think the way he talked about the Declaration and the founding is actually the way Democrats should do it. I think he's great on the campus Snowflake stuff. But Barack Obama, like all previous presidents, even when he had something partisan that he wanted to get done, he at least did the country the courtesy. I'm not trying to be critical here. He did the country the courtesy of talking as if he was the president of the whole country.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but then he loses. So then Trump kind of does it organically. All of that, I think, is fair game in trying to get elected. You try to get the voters that are going to vote for you to vote for you. That's what politics is. But the thing that is bizarre, look, as you know, I have criticisms of the Obama presidency.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But my point is that you get to 2016. Ted Cruz kind of wanted to do something similar where he was just going to change the electorate. He was going to goose up white working class rural vote. He was going to do it.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of changed the political formula by changing the electorate, right? Not the demographics, but just the electorate. You got more women, minorities, young people to turn out. And so the normal model of like running to the center, even though Barack Obama spoke to the center in his way and all of that, wasn't the driver.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A president would say if they wanted to make the Democrats hate him, right? And then so that I think was a huge mistake. And so Trump responds to praise. The people who praise him the most are the hardcore 25% of the party. And so what bothers me, I don't like populism. I didn't like it under Barack Obama. I didn't like it under William Jennings Bryan. I'm not a fan of populism. And I've been writing against populism for 20 years, so people who say, oh, you just don't like Trump. That's why you're saying this. No, I'm just trying to stay consistent. It's weird. So, you guys brilliantly in 2008.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bunkerization of our politics under Barack Obama, but instead with Trump, he comes out of the gate and he gives the speech. I mean, it's a little unfair, it's a little cliche, but there was a certain kind of, I bet it was better in the original German tone to it. The sort of blood and soil kind of stuff. And he said almost everything.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And I do think the sort of one of the Signature mistakes of the entire Trump presidency was that the inaugural address, right? If he had come out of the box doing what I feared and thought he would do and what Bannon clearly wanted him to do and give Democrats a trillion dollar stimulus bill, just some massive pork thing, right? Instead of tax cuts for the rich, right? If you had come out and done that, I don't know, I mean, you're a better vote counter than I am, but I would have gotten a bunch of Democrats and he would have gotten half a third of the Republicans. It was very similar to the sort of the stimulus fight that you guys had, which I think led to a lot of the...”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, no, look, I agree with that. And it's, I mean, on the flip side. He's not as bad from a conservative perspective. He's not as bad as I feared about some things. He was more willing. He had all the”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, or at least it was hyperbole grounded in truth. I mean, I think you lose. I mean, I want to test the proper position. Right. He'd lose some supporters if he shot people on Fifth Avenue. It depends who you shot.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's a big problem. It's also look, in politics, I mean, you know this stuff far better than I do, but traditionally the way you Guide or heard a president to a certain position is you say nice things about him when he does the things that you like and you criticize him when he does the things that are wrong. The problem is that Trump has None of the normal reactions to criticism. He only stick doesn't work. It has to be carrots. It has to be praise. And that distorts our understanding of how just politics works in a weird way. Because again, it's a psychological phenomenon that we're all trying to put. The prism of a political one.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sucks up to Trump in public. And so no one attacked him. And this is the mechanism of a cult of personality, where the real, you know, you judge political movements not by what they say they believe, but by what they prioritize. And the sort of Trumpist movement is in large respects about heaping praise and honor on Donald Trump. Because that's what Donald Trump responds to. That's what he cares about. And the people who have risen in the sort of conservative media sphere and political sphere in the last couple of years are the people who figured that out. They not only praise up, but they praise down. And that is bending the party in the movement.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But every now and then, when Trump did something indefensible, they wouldn't defend it and they would criticize it. And meanwhile, Rand Paul, who's probably done more than any other Republican to undermine huge chunks of the Trump agenda,”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree. And so this again gets us to this sort of psychological problem where back, remember when Steve Bannon... He was determined to destroy Mitch McConnell, right? Destroy Jeff Flake, Corker, SAS to a lesser extent, right? And again and again and again, they would say the Banonites, that these people are obstructing Donald Trump's agenda. And the reality is, look, Donald Trump's agenda is Mitch McConnell's agenda. Whatever Mitch McConnell gets through the Senate, they then credit to Trump as part of his agenda. What they didn't like was the fact that Corker and Flake and a handful of others, even though they voted 85%, 95%, but they ever knew more than 90%.”
2018-10-25 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 280 - Jonah Goldberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source