S2 Ep1025: Bill Kristol: Hegseth Keeps Proving his Unfitness

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Speaker 5 Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We have ended up with a double segment for your Monday pod today.

Speaker 5 My colleague Joe Perticone happened to be in Rome this morning for his wedding.

Speaker 5 And so we have a Catholic Rome correspondent who I spoke to about the death of Pope Francis, our first Jesuit pope, somebody that I feel a little, even as a lapsed Catholic, a little kindred spirit to, or maybe not kindred spirit, but a little connection to Papa Francisco, having been the first Jesuit pope, someone that has acknowledged the existence of gay Catholics and, you know, treated them with humanity.

Speaker 5 It came to, I think, really recognition, washing the feet of AIDS patients in Argentina. So it's a sad loss of Pope Francis.
I get into that at greater length with Joe Perticone in segment two.

Speaker 5 But up first, it's Monday. He's the editor-at-large of the Bulwark.
Not a Catholic, famously. It's Bill Crystal.
How are you doing, Bill?

Speaker 1 I don't think I'm famously not a Catholic.

Speaker 5 I mean, you're pretty famously Jewish, I guess.

Speaker 1 I'm famously okay with Catholics. Some of my best friends have been and are Catholics, and some lapsed and some not lapsed.

Speaker 5 A lot of converted Catholics in your world, actually.

Speaker 5 A lot of people coming in and a lot going out. A lot of movement

Speaker 5 in the doorway to Catholicism around Bill Crystal. Maybe worth mentioning, I guess, that

Speaker 5 the angel of death, our vice president, J.D. Vance, did visit Pope Francis the day before his death.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it is a little striking. You know, I don't follow

Speaker 1 the intra-Catholic controversies that much. I used to be kind of interested in it, but I've sort of lost touch.
But he seems to have been a very decent man.

Speaker 1 I say non-Catholic, looking at it from the outside. He seems to have been a very decent man in an age that's not very decent in many ways.

Speaker 1 And in that respect, I looked up to him, and I think he was an important public figure for non-Catholics as well. Don't you think, in this moment?

Speaker 5 For sure. And it was a noteworthy change.
If honestly, like much more in tone than in actual doctrine.

Speaker 5 There's a lot of, you know, the traditionalists, the trad Caths here in America, you know, tried to, like, I think, make him into something that he wasn't as far as radical change.

Speaker 5 I mean, I still can't get married in the church. There still aren't women priests, right?

Speaker 5 Like, it was more about his tone and his rhetoric, which was a pretty striking change from the severe Benedict, oh, Benedict.

Speaker 5 And I think that he was so old when I think, I forget, 75, 76, I think, when he ascended to the papacy, there's maybe a feeling that this was sort of a transitional pope, you know, kind of that would, he would back quickly, not to be macabre, but it back quickly to, you know, a more traditional type of pope.

Speaker 5 But, you know, he ends up like really remaking the types of people that are appointed to become cardinal, et cetera.

Speaker 5 And so, so, I don't know, as I get into it, Joe, it's possible that it may be more of a permanent shift more than transition.

Speaker 5 And we'll see how the conclave shakes out. So, that's that.
I guess I just would have to recommend one more time that if you have any elderly family members, I'd recommend they stay away from J.D.

Speaker 5 Vance for the near future, just in case. People that might be on their deathbed, how about that for a transition? Pete Hagseth is Secretary of Defense.

Speaker 5 A crazy Easter Sunday night series of leaks targeting Hegseth.

Speaker 5 I guess he had fired three people, including his chief of staff, with accusations that they'd been leaking, though there's, I think, some dispute on those accusations now last week.

Speaker 5 Then the New York Times is a story last night about how there's a second signal chat where he detailed war plans in Yemen. And this chat was not started by Mike Waltz, but was started by Hegseth.

Speaker 5 And it included his wife, his third wife, the former Fox News producer, including his brother, Phil Hegseth, his personal attorney.

Speaker 5 While all these people needed to know when the planes were taking off for Yemen, it is unclear.

Speaker 5 So that story is sort of this extension of SignalGate and an extension of this notion that there's just these guys are totally reckless in their behavior around this type of material.

Speaker 5 Subsequently, there's a politico story that was an op-ed, really, written by this guy, John Olyatt, who's been with Trump, who's a Trump spokesman dating back to 2016 on national security issues.

Speaker 5 So, a longtime Trump person. The article is almost grotesquely

Speaker 5 sucking up to Trump to a degree that is hard to bear. But once you get through all the Trump suck up stuff, I think which he has to share to kind of, I think, get his bona fides out there.

Speaker 5 He basically says that Pete Hegseth is an incompetent. He'd been hired by Hegseth to help set up the public affairs office.
He turned down a promotion opportunity because it was such a shit show.

Speaker 5 And he essentially says there are more shoes to drop. So that's like a basic summary of the Easter Sunday night hit job on Pete Hagseth.

Speaker 5 I'm wondering what your kind of top line reaction was to all that.

Speaker 1 No, an excellent summary. And you said it well last night on the video you did right away.
One side note on the perils of being a morning, early morning newsletter writer.

Speaker 1 I was planning to write on Hagseth.

Speaker 1 I watched your video and I thought I read the same thing, you know, the Times article and the political piece by Trump's former spokesman and had basically the same thoughts you had, but I thought I'd write a short thing this morning and just put in as a, you know, just in the document that we do morning shots in.

Speaker 1 I just put in a headline, and then I was going to get up early this morning, which I did, to write it, which I did.

Speaker 1 And the headline I put in was goodbye and good riddance, just because, you know, and I thought that I woke up this morning to the news that the Pope had died. I thought, maybe not.

Speaker 1 Don't have that headline in morning shots. It could be misunderstood.
So I did change it. At least I was alert enough to change that.

Speaker 1 And Joe has a wonderful piece in Morning Shots, which at least morning shots on the Pope, very similar to the conversation you had with him, of course. Really nice.

Speaker 1 I mean, so a couple of points about ex-F. It's, you know, the degree of irresponsibility.
The first, participating in the Waltz signal chat was bad.

Speaker 1 Sharing some of the military details in that chat was bad, but it was with at least his peers, his colleagues in the government.

Speaker 1 So he maybe he just forgot this wasn't on the right kind of phone, whatever. This is done on his own personal cell phone.
It's a group that was set up during his confirmation.

Speaker 1 So it doesn't have government officials. It may accidentally have some government officials of some of the people who went into government.

Speaker 1 But it was kind of the group working with him on his confirmation, presumably includes some PR and political types who were helping him out, lobbying the Hill and so forth, who probably didn't go into government, who have no clearances at all, leaving aside his wife and then the brother and his lawyer, both of whom are sort of NAMA in the Pentagon now, but they have jobs that do not require them to know the flight plans for the attack on Yemen.

Speaker 1 So totally irresponsible, beyond irresponsible. I mean, it would be a firing offense in 10 minutes in any other administration for the SECDAF to have done this.

Speaker 1 Incidentally, it would be a firing offense for anyone in the military who did this and for any civilian employee working under Pete Hagseth in the Defense Department. So that's A, he should be fired.

Speaker 1 B, the Republican senators might have known this was coming.

Speaker 1 They were warned by an awful lot of people, not just us, just by like the evidence of his life that this kind of thing was going to be a big risk. And 50 out of 53 of them.

Speaker 1 voted to confirm him really a disgrace. Any one of them could have stopped it, right? Any one of the 50.

Speaker 5 It's worth just sitting on this for a second because i feel like sometimes you know even at the bulwark whose mission is to name and shame the republicans sometimes we gloss over it because it's just the expectations are like below the earth they're so low for these guys but like this is the thing it was

Speaker 5 just utterly obvious to anyone you know like My aunt, who does not pay attention, you know what I mean? Like the guy at the corner store, right? Like you don't have to pay attention to politics.

Speaker 5 Anybody like, looks at this person. Pete Eggseth had never run a large organization.
He was a weekend Fox and Friends anchor, co-anchor. His personal life was a total disaster.

Speaker 5 He had had problems with alcohol, whether or not he still does, debatable. But like, you know, I mean, this was a grown man.

Speaker 5 at a work conference at 1 a.m. shouting at the hotel staff while drunk while like cheating on his mistress with a third person.

Speaker 5 Like the whole thing, you know, and then allegedly assaulting her based on that woman, that married woman's testimony, right?

Speaker 5 Like, and this is just a person that is a disaster across every possible metric.

Speaker 5 Like, there's just no way that you could look at this and say, well, you know, his personal life is a problem, but like, look at his resume or look at his experience running an organization.

Speaker 5 Or, you know, he hasn't run a big organization, but he's shown a lot of great judgment in other parts of his life. You know, like, there's nothing.

Speaker 5 And it was blatantly obvious he should not have this job running the world's largest and most important bureaucracy, really, the U.S. military.
And yet, these guys support him. Tillis

Speaker 5 has additional private information about how reckless he is and still goes to vote for him, still decides that his re-election prospects, which are looking pretty shitty right now anyway, are more important than just ensuring that the U.S.

Speaker 5 military is run by somebody who's like minimally competent to do the job.

Speaker 5 And it is just really shameful that

Speaker 5 the senators did not take the opportunity to say, no, we can't do this.

Speaker 5 Deputy, give them some training wheels or can we make him the spokesperson?

Speaker 5 But you can't confirm this person.

Speaker 5 And so here we are.

Speaker 1 And they could have, it's scary to vote publicly, I guess, against someone Trump is behind. That's no excuse, of course.

Speaker 1 Four of them could have gotten together and told Trump, withdraw this, or we're going to vote. The threat probably might have been enough.
It was with Gates.

Speaker 1 Wicker, the ranking Republican on Armed Service, Senate Armed Services, had expressed doubts about Hexeth and subsequently, just a week or two ago, did send, co-signed a letter asking for the IG investigation of the earlier signal chain, which actually may have triggered some of the events that led to this last fiasco with the firings and the like.

Speaker 1 So he sort of like popped his head up a tiny bit over the rampart, but again, too little, too late, and inexcusable. I was in some other text chain this morning.

Speaker 1 People were joking about how, you know, there's another case game where it is now, resume enhancement, to say the least, and lying, basically.

Speaker 1 Some other appointee who's up and someone said, yeah, that person will only get, you know, 90% of the Republican votes and 95% instead of, you know, 100%. You know, it's, it is terrible.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, worth, worth calling them out. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And it's worth mentioning that like this unraveled in three months or three months to the day from inauguration that these stories came out.

Speaker 5 And it's like, I mean, how horrific of a manager do you have to be to take a job and within a single quarter, somebody that you hired that says that they're a friend of yours is already going to the like thinks things are so bad that they need to go to the media and say, guys, we got to move on from this guy.

Speaker 5 I just think that's pretty notable. I could feel these three months have felt like many years, but it's only been three months.

Speaker 1 No, totally.

Speaker 1 And also that you've fired your chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, the two people who work directly for you, not people who came up through other means, so to speak, and Trump appointed.

Speaker 5 Former Lloyd Austin hangovers or or whatever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, or Trump appointees because they were buddies of his to be Secretary of the Army or that kind of thing. People who worked directly.

Speaker 1 And the chief of staff, the deputy secretary of defense, who I believe was a Hex Seth Crote, who was imposed on Feinberg. These three all get fired.

Speaker 1 They get anonymously smeared on the way out, apparently smeared on the way out of the door that they had problems with this leak investigation. They may have leak classified or sensitive material.

Speaker 1 They deny it. And apparently, the guy Olyat reports that they have, none of those even had a lie detector test.

Speaker 5 Yeah, let me just read this little bit bit from him because I think it's important. This is from the Olyatt article.

Speaker 5 He said that Defense Department officials working for HegSeth tried to smear these fired aides anonymously to reporters claiming they were fired for leaking sensitive information.

Speaker 5 Yet none of this is true, says Olyat. While the department said that it would conduct polygraph tests as part of the probe, not one of the three has been given a lie detector test.

Speaker 5 In fact, at least one of them has told former colleagues that investigators advised him he was about to be cleared officially of any wrongdoing.

Speaker 5 HegSeth's team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleague.

Speaker 1 No, amazing.

Speaker 1 Now, one thing you noticed, and you stressed last night, and I would say I actually noticed too, and this is probably both from our backgrounds, yours so much more in campaigns and dealing with the media in that way, and maybe a little more in government, I guess, but a couple of campaigns.

Speaker 1 Like, where did this story come from? You know, most people read, I find this all the time, actually, that you and I have, this is like our professional deformation.

Speaker 1 We read a story in the paper and the first question is less, what did it say, then why is that story there? Especially when it's it's four sources report.

Speaker 1 Well, who are the sources that would have known about this text chain, right? It's a dozen people.

Speaker 1 Maybe they blabbed about it a lot, but you probably have to be pretty close to HexF, probably in DOD, maybe over in the White House, I suppose, possibly, to have leaked this.

Speaker 1 Four people talking to the New York Times about this. I would say the knives are out for him, and this is the point you made.

Speaker 1 Probably some reinforcement from people still in the administration, not just the disgruntled aides. I think that's

Speaker 1 pretty striking, right? I mean, that they and the Trump pushback is very lame, I think. What was it? It was kind of a non-denial denial.
This is the fake news press going at it. It's not classified.

Speaker 1 That was their pushback. Not that he didn't do it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the flight plans of the F-15s are not classified information or sensitive information that shouldn't be shared on a non-secure cell phone with your wife and other friends, buddies.

Speaker 1 Nuts.

Speaker 5 Like not military people? Nuts.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, I do think that's, it doesn't prove that they're going to dump him. It proves that the knives are out for him.
And it suggests to me that he could well be dumped in the next day or two.

Speaker 1 Do you think?

Speaker 5 I mean, a day or two, I don't know. Like, Trump is, you know, famously stubborn in these cases.

Speaker 5 And, you know, it's sort of like, what is Hagseth saying? If Hagseth is on the side of Trump, you know, I mean, he could definitely survive.

Speaker 5 Like, we've been in plenty of these situations where it's like everybody around is like, Mr. Trump, this guy is crazy.

Speaker 5 But, you know, Trump doesn't care as long until the guy becomes a problem for him. So, you know, I think it's based a lot more on that relationship.

Speaker 5 But regardless of whether he stays or not, just the fact that these people close supporters of Trump, close to Trump, close to Hag Seth, are the ones that are trying to push him out, I think is telling.

Speaker 5 The other thing that you just, from your experience in government, it's just worth maybe saying a word about is just,

Speaker 5 you know, you do get into these little bunkers and bubbles. And just like, speak a little bit, we talked about last night about like the paranoia, right?

Speaker 5 Like the idea that you would like fire your close aides and then you're blaming them of things.

Speaker 5 I mean, it seems like a very unstable place for Hagseth to be, you know, if you're kind of engaging in this and the media at this point.

Speaker 1 No, totally. I was struck by the paranoia, too.
And I think at one point, one can make it, look, he's done damage, in my opinion, to our national security in the three months he's been there.

Speaker 1 A lot of it would have been done anyway because the policies weren't his idea, and someone else would have pursued the idiotic culture war stuff and taken down Jackie Robinson's portrait from the Pentagon and gotten rid of books in the Naval Academy and

Speaker 1 announced to the Europeans that we're no longer interested in defending Europe. All that stuff could have been done by some other Trump appointee as SECDAF.

Speaker 1 But now that this has all happened, leaving him there is genuinely bad for our national security in a very deep way. I mean, what do you do if you're a serious person in the Pentagon now?

Speaker 1 I guess you try to work around him, but I mean, that's not, he is literally the chain of command.

Speaker 1 I mean, just let's not forget, this is not like Secretary of the Interior, and it's a little guy's kind of embarrassing, and you just have to sort of hope the department kinds of runs itself.

Speaker 1 He's literally the next in the chain of command after the president, not even vice president, you know? So, you know, the staff can't really end run him on that.

Speaker 1 God knows whatever, you know, so I think the degree to which he really does need to be, and this is where I get I come back to the senators, Roger Wicker, the serious, Tom Cotton, serious people who care about national security, it's intolerable, this situation, that he's sec deaf.

Speaker 1 And they need to tell the president that. And they need to say it privately if they want for a day or two, but then they need to say it publicly.

Speaker 5 Agree. Just real quick, since you mentioned my buddy Ryan Holliday, who does the Daily Stoic, people might be familiar with his work.
He's a non-political guy. I've said MAGA people on his podcast.

Speaker 5 It's a podcast about the lessons that you can learn from the Roman Stoics. And he's written many books about that as well.
He wrote a book about kind of lessons in fatherhood for the Stoics.

Speaker 5 We did an interview about him. I think it was last Father's Day with them.
If people want to go check that out. Anyway, he was supposed to speak in the Naval Academy.

Speaker 5 It wasn't the first time he spoke there several times. And they called him and were like, are you going to mention the book bans?

Speaker 5 And he said, yeah, you know, I mean, I own a bookstore. I write books.

Speaker 5 It's going to be about lessons from the Stoics, including, you know, things such as you should engage with challenging ideas.

Speaker 5 You should engage with ideas that you don't believe in, or else you'll not be able to understand the opponent. Like, that's a part of war planning and battle planning.

Speaker 5 And so it wasn't a never-Trump thing. It wasn't like having me speak there.
You know, it was, but there was going to be a reference to it. They canceled his speech, the Naval Academy.

Speaker 5 You know, and this is all, again, like going back to this sort of ham-handed like attack on DEI from the TV host.

Speaker 1 I forgot you had interviewed you talked to Holiday. I don't know him at all personally, but he wrote a good piece in the New York Times about this a couple of days ago, which people should read.

Speaker 1 And the context in which he was going to bring this up, I believe, was he was going to talk about Admiral James Stockdale, a hero of his, and actually of mine, too.

Speaker 1 And I met him once or twice and always been concerned to try to redeem his reputation from that unfortunate vice presidential debate in 1992 when he was running with Perot, kind of unfair.

Speaker 1 Anyway, he talked about how it helped him as a prisoner of war, heroic prisoner of war for five years in Hanoi, to have read Marx and to have read communist works.

Speaker 1 And he took a whole course at Stanford, I believe, where he read, it wasn't balanced even, they just read Marxist Leniner's works.

Speaker 1 And he writes about this in his book, and he's a genuine hero, and he's a hero at the Naval Academy. And even so, they remove Maya Anchiloup because it might corrupt the young midshipman, I suppose.

Speaker 5 The other interesting thing from the Olyad story is he has this titillating line towards the end.

Speaker 5 There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week. So we'll see.
Again, coming from inside the house, the warning.

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Speaker 5 While we're doing foreign policy, a bit on Ukraine, we talked to Ian Applebaum about this somewhat on Friday, but I was kind of seeing the video as it came in.

Speaker 5 So I've had a few days to kind of let it simmer. But Rubio is in Europe and essentially says that Trump's getting bored with this, like the negotiation isn't working.

Speaker 5 And rather than, you know, there were some reports initially that he was pissed. Remember that? There's a league that I'm pissed at at Putin.

Speaker 5 Hasn't been any evidence of that or like any actions that would yield the type of response that a pissed person would have.

Speaker 5 And instead, you know, what Marko is essentially saying, and the Europeans were trying to kind of translate it, was we might just be done.

Speaker 5 Like if we can't get to a deal here, and in a weird way, sort of putting the onus on Zelensky, you know, on this, like, if you can't come to a deal, then the U.S. is just going to be done.

Speaker 5 What done means, you know, whether that's Intel sharing, whether that's no more money, you know, like all of that's still a little bit vague.

Speaker 5 But, you know, they're kind of laying the groundwork for just saying good night and good luck.

Speaker 1 Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, I think maybe it's even a little more direct because there are some reports now, I think from last night and this morning, that we put on the U.S.

Speaker 1 put on the table on Thursday in Paris, wherever they were meeting with the Europeans, the deal that we thought would be acceptable, which is a terrible deal for Ukraine, needless to say.

Speaker 1 And that's sort of what Rubio is insisting they accept. So either way, you're absolutely right.

Speaker 1 The threat is that we walk away and unless he just just takes this deal that's a very bad deal and leaves Putin in a very strong position and lets Putin say that he will have succeeded in his brutal invasion and also has the prospect of removing sanctions and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 So yeah, it's what we've all expected, I guess.

Speaker 1 Again, it's sort of like this isn't a surprise.

Speaker 1 You know, this has been the direction Trump and Vance and Hexeth and all of them have been going for since they took over, basically, and certainly since early February, mid-February, the Munich speeches, but still terrible to see it.

Speaker 1 And this is where the Europeans can make a difference.

Speaker 1 I don't know if the Ukraine can make it just with Europe, but I'm not sure they can't. They certainly can't for a while.
And Europe, I think, is horrified by this, and maybe they'll step up.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and there are mixed views on that. And, you know, Michael Weiss, when he was on a couple weeks ago, was very strong on the fact that he felt like Europe could do it if

Speaker 5 there was the will to do it. Just worth noting, because it happened over the weekend on this point, the deal that was on the table is a bad deal for Ukraine.
It's also not really a deal, right?

Speaker 5 In the way that, like, because Putin, right, Putin announced, you know, that he would have an Easter ceasefire because, you know, he is, you know, such a religious man, so respectful of the traditions and the faith.

Speaker 5 And then he went and flouted it. According to the Ukrainians, there were 2,800 incidents of firing on Ukrainian territory during the period where Putin said that there was a ceasefire.

Speaker 5 So it was basically one of these, we're calling for a ceasefire.

Speaker 5 You don't attack us because we don't want to be attacked on Easter, easter but we're going to keep attacking you you know the whole thing is preposterous uh zelensky gave a speech about this where he said that evil may have its hour but god will have his day i think trying to demonstrate which is on the side of the righteous here on um on easter sunday so

Speaker 5 anyway it's a pretty it's pretty bleak situation in ukraine

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Speaker 5 I guess even more bleak, though, we keep speaking about it than the situation in El Salvador, where there was the tiniest,

Speaker 5 green shoot, which we discussed last week with Kilmar Brego Garcia being able to meet with Chris Van Holland, Chris Van Holland, finally, you know, being the Democratic leader to demonstrate that you can have, I don't know if you can get results, but make somewhat of a difference by actually trying and advocating on this issue.

Speaker 5 There have been some reports from El Salvador that Brego Garcia is the first person people have seen leave Sukote, right?

Speaker 5 That like previously, anyone that had went in was there, like, and had not been released again.

Speaker 5 So, something to be said for that. Obviously, there's the big sort of

Speaker 5 propaganda back and forth with Bukele trying to make it seem like they were having margaritas. And then Trump, there's some debate online.

Speaker 5 Brego Garcia has the tattoos with a marijuana leaf, a smile, and then a cross and a skull. Some claim that that's an MS-13 tattoo.
Who knows?

Speaker 5 And then Van Holland kind of does the full Ginsburg this weekend going around on the shows.

Speaker 5 I'm in for JVL today and write about that and the triad for folks who want to go check out the newsletter, but I'm wondering what you made of Van Holland's comments upon return.

Speaker 1 I'm struck by how many Democrats continue to be unhappy with Van Holland, I guess. I mean, I just think he'd be trying to do the Lord's work.
He's doing the right thing.

Speaker 1 Probably politically the right thing to do, too, but that's kind of secondary in this case, I would say. I've been on, I don't know how many, two or three Zooms, honestly, since he went there.

Speaker 1 Gee, we're really uncertain whether this was the right thing to do. I mean, Gavin Newsom, I guess, is the person who said this most publicly on Wednesday, and then we wrote about it.

Speaker 1 And he sort of, his people tried to walk it back a little bit, that he didn't really mean to suggest that it was a distraction.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we shouldn't worry about people getting snatched up from the streets of the U.S. and sent to the Sculag in El Salvador.
And then sadly, over the weekend, they're trying to send more, right?

Speaker 1 There was this big court case that required the 1 a.m. Supreme Court intervention, which was required at 1 a.m.

Speaker 1 only because they had no confidence the administration wouldn't do what it sort of said it would do, kind of, that it would hold up for a while before shipping this next group out, which they'd previously pledged, incidentally, not to ship people out until there was notice and a chance for people to contest the judgment that they were gang members.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, incidentally, Bukele is also saying that he's happy to trade these people to Venezuela in return for some Venezuelan political prisoners.

Speaker 1 I don't know if he's just being buffoonish at this point, but again, it shows what he thinks he's got here.

Speaker 1 He's got like human capital, human prisoners he can sort of trade, like, you know, traffic in, right? As, you know, to get other people he wants. It's all beyond grotesque.

Speaker 1 And I'm glad Van Holland did his best, I think, to protest about it and also maybe to influence others in the government, including the courts who do follow the news after all.

Speaker 1 And that's one thing I'm struck by, incidentally just talking to some of the lawyers over the weekend, the degree to which judges, very different types of judges all around the country, now have discovered you can't believe what the Trump administration says, even in court.

Speaker 1 And that is a little, I think the courts have had this, maybe it's a conceit, but a kind of thought that, well, lawyers in court aren't going to be, you know, bullshitting the way politicians do.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's kind of how it worked.

Speaker 5 In the first Trump term, there was like this little rigamarole, right? Where they were

Speaker 5 basically honest in court. I don't want to overstate it.

Speaker 5 You know, I'm sure that somebody who has a specific memory of a time where they lied in court, but like directionally, they would say one thing in court that was closer to the truth.

Speaker 5 We'll put it that way. And then, you know, Trump would talk or

Speaker 5 Spicer would talk or whatever, and they would say something totally different, right?

Speaker 5 At least in that way, right? Like the courts felt like they were dealing with, you know, a counterparty in the government that was

Speaker 5 like at least giving them the true facts, regardless of how then the administration would act. Deep questions about that now, particularly when it comes to the immigration stuff.

Speaker 5 And I mean, this is what I wrote about, so I don't want to belabor the point in the newsletter. People can get my long views.

Speaker 5 I'm so just disgusted with the idea that there's even any debate to to be had about what Van Holland did and whether that's the right thing politically.

Speaker 5 For starters, like the election is just so far away that it's just so stupid to think.

Speaker 5 It's a hubris to think that some political strategist or some politician in Washington can know on April 21st, 2025, what will matter in November of 2026 is just like beyond comprehension.

Speaker 5 Like you people have no fucking idea. All right.
Like you have no idea. And let's not pretend you did.

Speaker 5 If you knew on April 21st, 2023 that donald trump would be elected again then then call me and i'll i'll listen to nostr damas but like let's just have a little bit more humility about what will actually be a big story in 18 months but like beyond that brego garcia isn't out of jail Andree is not out of that gulag, the makeup artist.

Speaker 5 There's this new story from the Guardian over this weekend about Arturo Suarez Trejo, who's this musician who's in North Carolina.

Speaker 5 It seems like his situation is pretty similar to the makeup artist who's there there in Sukkot now, who does not seem to have any gang ties.

Speaker 5 Like, these people are all still in prison, but we got a proof of life of one of them. There is a stall now on sending more people there.

Speaker 5 Like the clock matters here, like stopping the clock, preventing them from sending more and more people, which they obviously have an ambition to do, including citizens. That like matters.

Speaker 5 That is a real policy difference. And that stall is happening because of the actions of the politicians and the lawyers and the judges, right? Like all of this like matters in a substantive way.

Speaker 5 And I don't know, there was a poll that came out about the non-voters over the weekend that I thought was interesting.

Speaker 5 When you ask like Democratic-leaning non-voters why they didn't vote, a common refrain from a lot of them is that like they didn't think they were very strong, that they were fighting for them.

Speaker 5 They were tough, you know, you know, I don't know, who knows, right?

Speaker 5 Like if this will be the kind of thing that people will think, but I don't think it would hurt for the Democrats to demonstrate that there are some people in the party that have some actual backbone.

Speaker 5 And maybe, frankly, that would have some political benefit.

Speaker 5 And I think that there's an argument for that that is just as strong as the argument that, like, the median voter in 2026 is going to think that the Democrats are for MS-13 or whatever, because they don't think people should be disappeared to El Salvador.

Speaker 1 So. No, I totally agree.
And also, just one point about, if I could, about the judge, J. Harvey Wilkinson, who wrote the very eloquent opinion on Thursday, I guess it was.

Speaker 1 It's in Friday's morning shots.

Speaker 1 And obviously, people can read it anywhere about this program the seizing of people and sending them to el salvador and upholding the pause that the lower court had ordered on this i know jay harvey wilkinson a little bit he wrote for the weekly standard a few times very old-fashioned conservative judge reagan appointee one of the things of being an old-fashioned conservative though is you tend to actually defer to the government more than a lot of civil libertarians sometimes want and in fact wilkinson wrote an opinion in 2003 i think upholding some government actions with regard to guantanamo and al-qaeda prisoners which was overturned by the Supreme Court actually because they thought he went too far and deferred to the government.

Speaker 1 So this is not a guy who's even a libertarian conservative, particularly. He's really that kind of old-fashioned judicial restraint.

Speaker 1 A, I think we sort of ex-Republicans can take some pride that one of the most eloquent statements condemning

Speaker 1 this policy of Trump's and the actions of the Trump administration is done by an old-fashioned conservative, a Reagan appointee. But secondly, it is striking, and this was much too far for him.

Speaker 1 And so as I say, this is not a guy who is looking to be famous by being a libertarian on this. His instinct is if anything is rather the other way.

Speaker 5 He's like a resistance judge or like one of these things.

Speaker 1 No, he's just appalled, just appalled. And

Speaker 1 this is not consistent with the most fundamental characteristics of the rule of law.

Speaker 5 No, the Wilkinson statement was very, very good. I think that the fact that

Speaker 5 that there was a 7-2 Supreme Court ruling also on this, the blocking of additional use of the Alien Enemies Act, again, is like somewhat encouraging, right? That it's just Alito and Thomas.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, like you had Stephen Miller out there saying that, like, that totally undermined their spin, right? That like the Supreme Court was actually on their side, like this nonsense spin.

Speaker 5 And it's like, you know, it becomes pretty tough to make, I mean, you can make the case, and it will work for the Newsmax viewers that are not reachable, but it becomes pretty tough, like, to make the case broadly that Chris Van Hollen or the Democrats that are arguing for the rights of these people are on the side of MS-13 gang members when Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch are on their side too.

Speaker 1 In an emergency opinion at 1 a.m. on a Saturday morning, then they joined that.
They weren't, who knows what privately, which ones wanted to do it at 1 a.m. as opposed to the next day or something.

Speaker 1 But that, yeah, I agree. The 7-2 on the emergency opinion is a real sign that they think we have an executive branch that can't be trusted to follow the law.

Speaker 1 or to follow the decisions of other courts, because in this case, they thought it was very clear that the previous decisions should have bound the executive not to send these further people the next day.

Speaker 5 I'm going to end with some Hamilton for the cringe resist libs that are listening. So, do you have any other news items before we get to the attack on King George? I saw this tweet from a historian.

Speaker 5 I hate to not credit her. I'm blanking her name.

Speaker 5 We'll put the link to it in the show notes. And it was like a list of the grievances against King George and the Declaration of Independence.

Speaker 5 And, you know, you read or hear various times like the various parts of the preamble, like of the Constitution or the main thrust of the Declaration, but like you don't reread the list of grievances all that often.

Speaker 5 It had been a while since I had read them. And so I'm going to read a couple of them for people because it is pretty

Speaker 5 jarring just how apt it is to our current moment. Among them, he has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

Speaker 5 Another grievance for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world, for depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury, for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.

Speaker 5 He has excited domestic insurrections among us. In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress.

Speaker 5 In the most humble terms, our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

Speaker 5 A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Speaker 5 The section in particular, William Del Salvador, of the transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses. I mean, it's hard to get more on the nose than that.

Speaker 1 And I gather from my five-minutes of research on this, and I vaguely remember this from decades ago when I knew a little more about this, that was actually a pretty big deal.

Speaker 1 I mean, that it was considered a real affront. I mean, that they were sending these colonists to England to be tried instead of being tried before a jury of their peers here in the colonies.

Speaker 1 And the king was doing this unilaterally. So it is an apt comparison, as are the others.
It's another conversation we should have sometime. I think we discussed this briefly the other day offline that

Speaker 1 this past weekend was the 150th anniversary, obviously, of Lexington and Concord, the midnight ride of Fall Revere and all that.

Speaker 1 We're going to spend now the next year plus celebrating the revolution and then actually beyond that, the actual war that follows from the Declaration of Independence, but the next year plus celebrating up to July 4th, 1926, 1926, 21, 26, which will be the 250th anniversary.

Speaker 1 Very important to, I think. Trump will try to hijack this and make this all about his version of America.

Speaker 1 Very important that we all in our different ways, and I think think it should be in a decentralized way and have millions of different people could do millions of different things.

Speaker 1 Historians can have one kind of series of panel discussions and people like us could do other things at the bulwark, but insist that we are the ones defending the American Revolution.

Speaker 1 We are defending what America is about. We are the, if I can put it this way, the patriotic side in this fight.
And it's not just a rhetorical trope to talk about Trump as a kind of mad king.

Speaker 1 It's literally the case that he's trying to abridge some of the most fundamental things that we fought for in the revolution.

Speaker 5 We'll leave it there. Up next, a little bit from Joe Perticone from Rome.
Folks want to hear more about the passing of Pope Francis. Bill Crystal, I'll see you back here again next Monday.

Speaker 4 Ah,

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Speaker 5 Hey, everybody, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark here. Pope Francis died this morning on Easter Monday, born Jorge Vergoglio.
He was the first Jesuit pope.

Speaker 5 Shout out to the Jesuits, first Latin American pope. And we are lucky to have our congressional correspondent, Joe Perticone, in Rome for a wedding.
Weddings and funerals.

Speaker 5 You know, there's always a connection. How are you doing, Joe?

Speaker 27 I'm very sad, but very happy because it's my wedding. But then

Speaker 27 the sadness of learning about the death of Pope Francis, someone who I admire greatly,

Speaker 27 was a big shock, you know, and I found out when I was five minutes walking distance from the Vatican, and so I was like, let's walk over.

Speaker 27 We knew beforehand because we're sickos who check our phones all the time. But most of the people there didn't appear to know.
It was like not a lot of crowds because it was early in the morning.

Speaker 27 And then I started watching people and nuns, priests, you know, tourists,

Speaker 27 you know, Jews, Muslims. There's tons of people there just as tourists.
And you start seeing people look at their phones and then you see people gasp.

Speaker 27 And then you start seeing people like tearing up a bit.

Speaker 27 And then suddenly I turn around and what was five people behind me was hundreds, thousands, a sea of people just all walking over to pay their respects, to wait, to see what happens kind of a shocking moment but it was uh very powerful yeah talk a little bit more about the mood i mean reverential the uh you sent a picture to our slack of you know a couple folks doing the rosary a very familiar picture to catholic schoolboy like me but catholics also you know funerals are

Speaker 5 a mixed emotion with catholics right i mean you're going home to god it's less dour maybe than in some funerals i've been to and some other faiths what what was the mood like in the square because we were there like right when it happened, there was just a lot of shock because he had been sick for a long time, but then he had really looked like he turned the corner.

Speaker 27 And this past week was Holy Week. So he was doing public events.
He did the stations of the cross. He snubbed J.D.
Vance and then met with him very briefly last night. He drove.

Speaker 27 in the Popemobile through St. Peter's Square just yesterday.
So he was doing a lot more events. So people thought he would turn the corner.

Speaker 27 So it was not surprising, but I think the abruptness and especially the morning after Easter. And so here in Italy,

Speaker 27 Monday after Easter is Pascre, which is the, it's another national holiday. So there's not a lot going along.
A lot of stores are closed. So it was just like

Speaker 27 very, very sudden.

Speaker 27 People expected, you know, if he was going to die, it was going to be in the same kind of dramatic fashion that the several months prior to him getting better were, that it would be more expected.

Speaker 5 Well, since you mentioned it, we have to at least do the brief on the rank politics of our vice president, J.D. Vance, having briefly met with him yesterday.
J.D.

Speaker 5 tweeted this morning about how he got to meet the Pope yesterday, the day before his death. I don't know if there's anything more to say about that.

Speaker 5 Do you have anything else on the JD of the situation?

Speaker 27 Here's a quote. So

Speaker 27 Vance was, I guess, wanted to meet with the Pope like any Catholic would, and J.D. Vance converted to Catholicism just a handful of years ago.

Speaker 27 And then the Vatican just said, no, you're going to meet with the Secretary of State of the Vatican. That's it.
And

Speaker 27 Pope Francis then did his Good Friday Stations of the Cross, in which he gave a long series of remarks. One of them stuck out to me, which you can read in morning shots, was

Speaker 27 a very obvious critique of the West and of the United States right now.

Speaker 27 He said, today's builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers and that those who fall along the way are losers theirs is the construction site of hell and that really

Speaker 27 was another example of how pope francis was very critical of right-wing governments of overly aggressive discompassionate capitalist governments and

Speaker 27 for him to be talking that way to the very end and then to give Vance a very brief meeting. This was just like an exchange of pleasantries.
He gave a couple Easter eggs for Vance's kids.

Speaker 27 He gave JD a tie or something and was just like, great.

Speaker 27 And the photos the Vatican release, he's sitting there like, and Vance is, you know, giddy, as anyone and any Catholic would be meeting the Pope. But Vance's politics differ greatly.

Speaker 27 And Pope Francis was a huge, huge advocate for migrants, which this administration is an active danger. to all migrants.
And so

Speaker 27 the politics are there and they're going to be throughout the, especially throughout the selection process for the new pope, because Pope Francis, people think, oh,

Speaker 27 there are so many conservatives in the American Catholic Church that they don't want another, you know, progressive like Pope Francis. I don't think that's true.

Speaker 27 He's really remade the College of Cardinals in a way that very much mimics his idea that you place priority on the poor and on migrants. And so

Speaker 27 you might see a continuation of his style of leadership if you look at the preferredi, which is, you know, the guys who they expect to be in the running, you know, the final four to be the next popes, a lot of them are very similar to Pope Francis ideologically.

Speaker 27 And so, if their personality is similar to his, which was very unafraid of very powerful people outside the church, you know, you can expect that to continue.

Speaker 27 And you can expect the divide between, you know, these very new Catholics like Vance, who

Speaker 27 practice things that aren't Catholic at all, really, don't really align with Jesus' teachings. And so

Speaker 27 the politics are still going to be there, and you're going to hear from a lot of them as this process goes forward.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I'll put a link in the notes here. There's a very long, the pillar is just a very good Catholic media outlet that had a very long obit.
that I read this morning of Francis.

Speaker 5 And he really does position it as like, Francis was not like the radical left pope that like the, you know, that the mega bishops in America like tried to make him out to be, like the very politicized American church, right?

Speaker 5 And we see this in a lot of different areas. I Denver, where my family is, my brother works at the Jesuit school.
The bishop there, archbishop, is

Speaker 5 extremely far-right, doctrinaire, pro-Trump bishop. It's kind of like, what is that? It's a rather new thing, this influx Catholic Church.
But that is not really how Francis is seen.

Speaker 5 Obviously, he's not seen as a far-right,

Speaker 5 and he didn't identify as that. And obviously, he focused more on the poor.

Speaker 5 Like, his changes around giving a blessing to same-sex couples or whatever were a lot more mild than what a lot of folks wanted to paint him out to be.

Speaker 5 And it was more about, you know, kind of his focus on the poor and his image. And he became, he came into, you know, recognition as Archbishop in Argentina, going to the slums, right?

Speaker 5 Like washing the feet of AIDS patients and, you know, doing the types of lowering himself that is so counter to kind of this whatever faux masculine faux tough guy you know sort of element that we're seeing on the right

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Speaker 5 There isn't one other political kind of element here. Tom Homan, the immigration czar for Trump, like went after Pope Francis not just a few months ago, saying, I've got harsh words for the Pope.

Speaker 5 The Pope ought to fix the Catholic Church. And so, you know, you are going to see, I think, a very kind of politicized treatment of this, you know, from this White House and from MAGA World.

Speaker 5 I don't know if you have anything else on that.

Speaker 27 Yeah. And you could have seen it on

Speaker 27 Thursday. Every Holy Thursday, Pope Francis visits a prison outside of Rome where he washes the feet of the inmates, which is a very symbolic gesture

Speaker 27 because back in olden times, if you didn't take care of your feet, you were as good as dead. And so now it's more of a symbolic thing of washing the feet.
And

Speaker 27 he would he goes into these prisons every year and he and this year he said every time i come here i i ask you know why them and not me and that that same day you had republican member members of congress even one who claims to be a practicing catholic like riley moore from west virginia doing the thumbs-up pose at the world-famous torture prison in el salvador and so

Speaker 27 There is that huge divide. I think when we look at the way that Pope Francis approached things, a lot of people liked to make him in their image.

Speaker 27 And so they would say things like, oh, he's this, you know, radical liberal, or he's this huge progressive.

Speaker 27 That's sort of misreading the situation. When he would say, oh, I want to give blessings to LGBT people or I, you know, want women to be treated fairly.

Speaker 27 He wasn't saying, well, let's have some, you know, purple-haired, woke priest now. You know, he wasn't doing that.

Speaker 5 He didn't change. There's no women in the priesthood now.
You know, like there's like a lot of things that didn't change.

Speaker 27 And most Catholics aren't demanding that.

Speaker 27 And he's just made it a more inclusive for, you know, the worshipper, which is the most important thing. That's what affects the most people.
And that's what stuck out to me.

Speaker 27 And the way that he's cared for the poor, like he made this quote. So

Speaker 27 right around inauguration time,

Speaker 27 I read this quote from Pope Francis where he said, when you give money to the poor, don't just drop a coin in their cup and keep walking. Stop and make eye contact with them.

Speaker 27 That's the more important thing you can do than anything. And when I was walking to the

Speaker 27 January 6th or inaugural ball, which I wrote a piece about, there was a homeless man outside. Everyone was ignoring him.

Speaker 27 And I stopped and I gave him, I think it was 10 bucks and I looked him in the eye and I was like, He's 100% right. That is much more meaningful.

Speaker 27 And then I went into the January 6th inaugural ball, and that was another story.

Speaker 5 What are you making eye contact in there?

Speaker 27 That eye contact was a lot more uncomfortable.

Speaker 27 You know, having like even the smallest amount or changing, calibrating the way you view the most vulnerable people, that was a huge theme of his message. And that was

Speaker 27 something that I think a lot of people, especially over in St. Peter's Square, where I just was, like,

Speaker 5 That was the vibe is that this was a very decent man in a very indecent period in history well i mean he named himself like the francis comes after saint francis assisi who's kind of a hot saint when we were growing up but um uh besides that known for you know care of animals mostly but but really for society's outcasts right and that's like how he tried to to frame himself did you get to hear the bells were the bells tolling at the st.

Speaker 5 Peter's Basilica?

Speaker 27 Yeah, they do their like standard bells at 11 a.m. But they were kind of going off and on throughout the morning.

Speaker 27 I'm going to try and head back there later this evening when the Camera Lingo, which is essentially the Susie Wiles of the Vatican, will lay him in the coffin.

Speaker 5 Ouch,

Speaker 27 well, you know, a much nicer version of Susie Wiles, basically the chief of staff. And

Speaker 27 I'm going to try and go there. I'm expecting a much bigger crowd even than I saw.

Speaker 27 this morning because more people will get word more people are going to come in from out of town and and right now too is every 25 years in the catholic church it's called the jubilee and

Speaker 27 it's a period where everyone floods to italy and so it's more packed in general with especially religious people all the people on my flight half maybe two-thirds of them were just you know church groups making the 25-year pilgrimage um to italy you know there were huge groups and you could tell and so it's going to be really packed and this is going to make it even more packed.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I did not realize it was the Jubilee. I remember the 2000 Jubilee as a Catholic schoolboy vividly.
Anyway, Joe Perticone, well, give us more. If you go there later tonight, do it.

Speaker 5 Give us a little video of the scene. We can post it on the page here and appreciate it.
Congrats on the wedding. And thanks for doing a little work on your wedding week.
Yep. All right.

Speaker 5 Thanks to Joe Perticone for hopping in on his wedding week live from Rome, from Vatican City, even, on the death of Pope Francis. Thanks to Bill Crystal.
As always, rest easy, Papa Francisco.

Speaker 5 and we'll see everybody else back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork Podcast.

Speaker 1 Peace.

Speaker 4 I believe in my

Speaker 4 states

Speaker 4 and accidents

Speaker 4 that the nature of a life

Speaker 4 is

Speaker 4 chaos and confusion,

Speaker 4 And men's rules of law

Speaker 4 and order

Speaker 4 may not stand

Speaker 4 And I should be and me not

Speaker 4 afraid

Speaker 4 to reach for heaven

Speaker 4 I may think that I

Speaker 4 know

Speaker 4 the true hearts and needs

Speaker 4 my pride may bring

Speaker 4 me low

Speaker 4 unable

Speaker 4 to see

Speaker 4 no closer than yesterday.

Speaker 4 But tomorrow I may stand

Speaker 4 in the end, be not

Speaker 4 afraid

Speaker 4 to reach for him.

Speaker 5 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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