Charlie Sykes Ominously Predicts 2024 Will Be ‘Wilder’ Than 1968: ‘Going To Be So Many Black Swan Events’

Charlie Sykes spoke with Susan Glasser, an author and staff writer at The New Yorker, about the current state of the Republican Party and the 2024 presidential election on the Bulwark Podcast this week.

The conversation struck an undeniably ominous tone as they both warned of the immense dangers of a possible second Trump term, with Glasser concluding that U.S. politics is never returning to pre-Trump norms.

Sykes began by asking Glasser what was the most dramatic, consequential election of her lifetime. “I think that the correct answer is 1968,” Sykes eventually told Glasser, adding:

See, this is why. Because I’m so much older than you. I was there, I actually remember that. And that was the wildest presidential election year that I think we’ve had really in the last century.

When you think about it, you had assassinations, you had riots, you had the incumbent president of the United States running for reelection, then dropping out. And again, I was in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention where there were riots.

We actually had the police riot led by Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Richard Daley, and, of course, the election of Richard Nixon. But what I was thinking about was that as wild as 1968 was this year’s going to be wilder. And we already know that usually at the beginning of the year, you have no idea what’s going to happen. You can never predict that Robert F. Kennedy was going to be assassinated or Martin Luther King would be assassinated. You could not have predicted the Chicago riots. You couldn’t have predicted Lyndon Johnson would drop out.

“But this year, there are going to be so many black swan events,” Sykes declared, concluding:

Again, we don’t know how it’s going to play out, but it is going to be one of the most extraordinary elections just in terms of the events, but also in terms of the consequences, because it is a stark choice on the ballot in November.

I mean, talk about two different realities and futures for America on the ballot in 2024, trying to remember a year that we went into knowing it was going to be as consequential as this one. Sometimes we’re taken by surprise. This one, you know, this is right in our face.

“Yeah, that’s right. This is the election of what, you know, Donald Rumsfeld would call the ‘known unknowns.’ It’s not really a black swan in that sense, which is meant to be the sort of come from totally out of the blue. We know already that we are facing just a series of essentially unprecedented convergences between the courtroom and the campaign trail, the scrambling of the political primary process essentially in a way that we’ve never seen,” Glasser replied.

“It was your own news outlet just yesterday on the first work day of the New Year, right, Charlie, that pointed out that Donald Trump looks to basically win the Iowa caucus by the largest margin a Republican has ever done so. And it could be that the primaries are over for all intents and purposes after Iowa and New Hampshire,” she added.

“And, of course, you know, layering on that, the fact that the Republican nominee may show up here in my hometown of Milwaukee as a convicted felon, we don’t know,” Sykes replied, adding:

We don’t know what the Supreme Court is going to do. We don’t know any of those things or how the electorate will react to it. What we do know, though, is that I think a lot of voters have this sort of sense of kind of doom because this is the election, quite frankly, that a lot of Americans don’t want. They do not want a replay of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump.

Sykes then pivoted to talk about Nikki Haley’s Civil War gaffe in New Hampshire, in which she omitted slavery as a cause of the conflict.

“But it is day seven. It feels like kind of a throwback to the before times back in, you know, before 2016 where gaffes actually mattered, where if a politician said something stupid or offensive or ridiculous or untrue, that it would actually have real consequences because it no longer is the case,” Sykes argued, noting the length of the news cycle focusing on Haley’s gaffe.

“I mean, you know, there are some listeners who probably don’t even remember when if you said something insensitive about rape, you know, it might end your political career. If you talk about grabbing women, it might actually derail your candidacy. And so we spent seven days talking about Nikki Haley, which has been I’m not criticizing that, but there is Donald Trump sitting there,” Sykes continued, adding:

The great reality of our times is that Donald Trump says something outrageous, outlandish, untrue, inflammatory every single day. And it’s become normalized. You become numb to it. I mean, this is what Brian Klaas calls the banality of crazy. How do we cope with that?

Because I’m just going through all the nutty things that Donald Trump has said in the last seven days, including telling people, you know, you should rot in hell, Merry Christmas, which barely registered like a shrug. And you were all obsessed about Nikki Haley.

So this is going to be a hard year, isn’t it, Susan? I mean, just to keep the focus on, do not be distracted by the squirrels, when we have the orange wildebeest sitting right there. He’s not going away.

“That metaphor is going to stick with me, Charlie. Of course you’re right. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. This is an age in politics where there appear to be Donald Trump rules and then rules for everybody else,” Glasser replied.

Listen to the full podcast here.