Peter Hamby: How Far Can the DSA Go?

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Glad to welcome back to the show my buddy, USA Soccer super fan, football super fan. He's the former host of Good Luck America on Snapchat. He just announced on Monday that he's joining PUC full-time as chief national correspondent. He's also been the host of The Powers That Be podcast.
It's Peter Hamby, what's up, bro?

**Peter Hamby** (0:34)
Hey, man, how you doing?

**Tim Miller** (0:35)
I'm doing well. I'm on the mend. So I've got my Gator Lite here, rapid rehydration, and we're doing pretty good. Better than yesterday's podcast. We're going to really nerd out, as is our want on campaign politics.
We had a lot of results last night that are interesting. The takes are flying. Before we get to going around the map, I just want to pick out a couple of things from the Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swann book. We'll probably go deep on this next week, but some of the excerpts are leaking out there.
I guess we should start with the JD Marco stuff. They had this anecdote in the book about how Trump has redecorated the office, famously to put a lot of gold flourishes in there. Many listeners are unhappy with my take about how I think the more is more, affect is a little bit better than what Biden had in the Oval Office. People don't like it. It's my least popular take, but I'm standing by it. Anyway.

**Peter Hamby** (1:28)
I haven't heard this take from you. Sorry. You think that you should do maximalist decorations in the Oval Office?

**Tim Miller** (1:34)
I like the maximalist decorations. When you see the images of Biden, you see the side by side, Biden's pallid skin with the gray, off-white walls. It's just not good. I feel like as millennials, one of our big misses is everybody, we tried to minimize everything was being streamlined.
Everybody's houses were more clean, a lot more whites and off-whites. It's like the Cracker Barrel redesign. I hated the Cracker Barrel redesign.

**Peter Hamby** (2:04)
It's like that coffee shop we went to in Slow those years ago, where there's like, and by the way, I'm guilty, you can see behind me, having like hanging ivy, but yeah, exactly. The beige countertops and the sort of the sign where you put in the like little letters to order the flat white or whatever, and they're playing like a low Tame and Paula beats behind you. I don't, by the way, Biden definitely wasn't doing that. But I do think though, the colors kind of work actually, maybe even the lighting. Things do feel a little brighter in there when you see the camera pool.

**Tim Miller** (2:36)
They feel brighter. So anyway, I mean, I wouldn't do like everything like Home Depot gold, but I just think as a general matter, a little more maximalism is good. Anyway, Trump was asked about whether he's worried that his successor will undo all that he had done design wise. That's probably is a real worry for Trump.
His response was the Cubans love gold. This little slide, Trump response, he likes to do this, he likes to play these guys off each other.
He's got JD eating shit right now on the Iran deal. I don't really buy it that Marco is passable for the Republican electorate, but I don't know. I'm just curious what you make of all of it.

**Peter Hamby** (3:19)
I talked about this the other day with Julia Yaffe on my podcast. Thanks for the shout out. We're on YouTube now, The Powers That Be. If you go into polling, and I did this the other day with some of our Echelon polling, they basically test every question in their battery among MAGA Republicans and Party First Republicans. Now, you, Tim, and maybe some Bulwark listeners would have once identified as a Party First Republican, like the more traditional Bush, McCain, Reagan types before Donald Trump came along. It's been a minute, but they're still out there to an extent, and they tested, and I just actually looked in the cross tabs. Those are horse race numbers for Republicans 2028, and Marco loses to Vance among Party First Republicans, but not by that much, and he's been creeping up in polls. He's, I can't remember the number off the top of my head, but say he was losing to JD by like 13 points in that horse race poll. Pretty good place to be. Like I was, I always think heading into presidential primaries, you'd rather run from behind than be the front runner the whole time.
But JD is crushing Marco among MAGA Republicans, those Trump first Republicans by like 30 or 40 points. And like, look, that's the party.