S2 Ep1020: Bill Kristol: Staring Down the Barrel

San Jose's airport is a simple airport to fly through, which is great if you're a business traveler running late, because you never want to be overheard saying, I can't believe I missed my flight because that stupid security line was just... SJC security lines tend to be shorter, and you can go from curb to gate in minutes.
Because of all that, you'll never say... San Jose Mineta International Airport.
Fly simple, fly SJC. Visit flysjc.com.
That sound? It's lucky cutting prices on over 4,000 items across our stores. We cut prices, not corners.
Same quality, much lower prices on what matters most to your family. This week, 7-Up, A&W, and other select six-pack bottles are a ridiculous 99 cents

each. That's a $7 savings on each six-pack with an additional qualifying purchase of $50 or more.
And Green Bell peppers are now just 99 cents each every day. Join the celebration at Lucky, your neighborhood store that's fighting inflation for you every day.
Berries and stores with beverage tax.

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Thank you to JVL for sitting in on Friday. How great is David Frum? Made it easy on him.
Congrats also to my brother from another mother, Rory McIlroy, on the Masters win. Big ups to listeners Josh and Jason for the little bonus hospitality at Coachella.
And with that, I think there's only bad news left to cover. So I'm going to bring in Bulwark editor at large, Bill Kristol, as is our habit on Mondays.
How are you doing, Bill? I'm doing fine. How are you? How was Coachella? It was amazing.
It was just so marvelous. Everyone was happy.
Gaga was just completely on another level from all the other acts. But we saw a lot of good ones.
Amare, Viagra Boys. I think I would have trouble dealing with all that happiness.
But you are a better person than I. And you can turn off the world around us and enjoy the happiness for a weekend.
I completely turned it off. The only time my happiness bubble was popped was when Sam Stein was texting me about work stuff or one of the artists, Dark Side, great artist, but did like a three minute, you know, anti-Trump rant.
And I'm like, you know, 30 seconds is sufficient. You know, once you get into the minute four, a little much for me, we're trying to escape our dark reality.
Speaking of our dark reality, I guess we need to start in El Salvador, which David Frum repeatedly called our only ally on the Friday pod, to my amusement. Close enough to true.

So we've got President Bukele in D.C. today.
I guess we'll be meeting with Trump.

The latest in the legal situation with Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

That's the father in Maryland who was wrongfully sent to Sakat in El Salvador.

On Sunday, the government stonewalled the district court judge filing an update saying it had no updates. And in a separate filing challenge, the Supreme Court's 9-0 order to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return and added that the details of the deal with Bukele are classified.
You know, potentially a big legal showdown here. Like, we'll see kind of what happens with Bukele, but JVL has a pretty alarmist triad, which, you know, I know tickles both of our funny bones, but what do you make of it at the biggest picture? I mean, it's terrible.
It's terrible what's happened. It's terrible that the government of the United States and the Trump administration are, I guess, defending what's happened or at least professing to be incapable of fixing what's happened or not.
And certainly not trying at all hard or even appearing to try hard to fix what's happened. That part, I really can't quite believe.
I can believe what I'm saying. But that part is shocking.
You know, in a sense, I mean, of course, what's happened is the most shocking thing. But, you know, not even sort of going through the motions of trying to say.
But that part is shocking, you know, in a sense, I mean, of course, what's happened is the most shocking thing. But you're not even sort of going through the motions of trying to fix what they have acknowledged is an injustice or wrong, which, of course, they could fix in two minutes.
I don't know if Kelly's not going to say no to Trump if he says it's important to get him back. And, you know, we'll do it in some way that saves face for you if you want.
But anyway, it's so that's not a bug. That's a feature, right? The unwillingness to rectify the injustice.
Yeah. Oh, no, for sure.
And I think there is kind of a typical political scandal element to this. And obviously, Trump is atypical in so many ways.
But they've gotten just way out ahead of themselves with their rhetoric about, you know, like this guy is a, you know, MS-13 member, you know, everyone down there is a violent, dangerous criminal. Like once you kind of do that, it makes it harder to just admit wrong.
And like, you see this from all kinds of politicians, right? Like you get in trouble and then it's harder to admit, you keep digging the hole deeper, but it's like, once they do, then doesn't that open? And God willing, it would to like for the other people who are there that may be wrongfully. It's just this just happens to be the only guy they've admitted was it was a mistake.
Right. And I mean, I think this is kind of dark, but they don't mind having a little bit of fear out there that it could happen to other people who are not criminals and not gang members.
And any, you know, they like it with the immigrants. Clearly, they like that.
They think it will lead to self-deportation or at least, well, self-deportation or not coming here in the first place or leaving or, I don't know, hiding more or something like that. Not causing trouble, certainly.
It's like with the campus stuff, right? You know, I mean, this stuff does have a deterrent and chilling effect. and not just on immigrants, incidentally.
That part of it is what I find. That is classic authoritarian dictatorship beyond the kind of, oh, we're on the way towards authoritarianism.
You know, you want some cases that are obviously unjust to really put the fear of God into everyone that can't do anything that even looks problematic from the point of view of the government. And that seems to be where we are.
And this, I think, is just a reasonable fear, particularly for people that are here on visas, you know, like anybody whose status is not permanent residency, you know, or citizen, obviously. I don't think I would advise somebody, you know, in that shoes to, like like come or stay in the country because the risks are so great and when i said an email from a from a listener just this morning i was reading where his son's roommate you know basically had to self-deport who had done nothing you know but like got a letter was at college here was from the middle east you know decided it's just better just mean, like, that seems like a rational choice.
In this case, he got a letter. But even if you didn't, right? Like, they want that fear, and I don't think it's irrational at this point.
Right, at least he got the letter, which is more than the young woman at Tufts did, and she just got seized on the street. I mean, and again, they're there, which that seems very clearly to be unjustified and unwarranted.
And there, too, they're doing nothing to remedy the error. Well, the tough situation, the Post had a story over the weekend that the State Department, you know, some career in the State Department had determined that there was no evidence she engaged in.
And again, it would not be illegal to have a whatever. I I wouldn't support having a pro-Hamas flag, but it wouldn't be illegal.
But there was no actual evidence that she engaged in any anti-Semitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization. That was like the State Department's own internal assessment.
And it may be that legally, it's just immigrants don't have many rights, honestly, and their visas can be revoked. And legally, that could be done somewhat arbitrarily, and you don't have to defend it.
I'm not sure if this went to court. She would win in that respect, though maybe she would.
I don't know. Maybe the current provisions are unconstitutional in terms of their arbitrariness, but if I'm reading the current provisions correctly.
But having said all that, whether it's marginally legal or not, which is sort of where the debate goes to, it's not the right thing to do. I mean, you know, we're so far down the road of debate.
And I'm not blaming anyone for this. I'm in this trap, too, of trying to sort of say, well, you can't do that.
You can't do this. We've forgotten the more elementary fact that you shouldn't be doing any of this.
There's absolutely no need for it. It's entirely unprovoked and setting up a terrible system where people don't feel they can speak up.
I mean, I really do wonder if anyone who's not here, who's not a citizen, basically, feels he or she could express an opinion about any political thing at this point. Why would you now? Maybe you could say, okay, well, we'll live in a country where they won't express their opinions, I guess.
What if you're a student in a classroom, a student in grad school, and you're asked to join a... I mean, that leaves like protests and all that.
I'm just thinking of writing an article on something or whatever. This is like the past week or two, I've been having crazy conversations with a friend who had a friend that was coming from abroad who has, I forget what their immigration status is, some kind of mixed status.
and their lawyer told them, bring a burner phone like we're in Russia

because it's just like better safe than sorry you know you don't want them going through your phone like bring a clean phone that doesn't have you know any memes on it that might you know come afoul of the you know agents at the airport and like that's crazy that like a lawyer is suggesting that

you know i mean even if it's maybe a little overly cautious like the notion of it being out there tells you how far down we've gone you know everybody except donald trump understands that it's important to plan it's important to have some consistency you know to know what is coming if you're going to randomly have your tariff rate increase by 122% one day and then decrease by 80% the next day, that makes it challenging to plan. But there are other areas in life where you've got control.
And trust and will makes creating your will easy and time efficient, meaning you can focus on other important tasks. You can get 20% off at trustandwill.com slash bulwark.
You can keep your family prepared and protected by managing your will or trust online. Each will or trust is state specifically, legally valid and customized to your needs.
Ensure your family and loved ones avoid lengthy, expensive legal proceedings or the state deciding what happens to your assets. Their simple step-by-step process guides you from start to finish one question at a time save loved ones time and stress by having all your documents in one place with bank level encryption and live customer support is available through phone chat and email uncomplicate the process with trust and will protect what matters most in minutes at trustandwill.com slash bulwark and get 20% off.
That's 20% off at trust and will.com slash bulwark. Just on the legal part of this, because JVL kind of wrote about basically the three doors that we're going to come through here with Bukele in the US.
One is basically, he says, you know, I've decided to, in my own graciousness, like give back Kilmar Garcia, and we're not going to change anything else about our program. There is the option of, well, you know, he's going to kick the can, he's got to wait and see what, you know, what more comes down the the pike or like there is the option that he just says no like this person is a danger to el salvador and i'm going to keep him there all right and actually we might have a little bit of clarity on which dark door we're going through uh because as we are taping here the press conference is happening live in the oval office with uh bukele and trump And here is what Bukele just said about whether he's planning on returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Can President Bukele weigh in on this? Do you plan to return him? Well, I'm supposed to have suggested that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? How can I smuggle? How can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle smuggle him into the United States or what do I do? Of course, I'm not going to do it. It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous.
How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States. So you could release him inside of the United States.
Yeah, but I'm not releasing, I mean, we're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. I mean, we just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country of the Western Hemisphere,

and you want us to go back into releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world. That's not going to happen.
Well, they'd love to have a criminal released into our country. I mean, there's a fascination.
They would love it. Yeah.
These are sick people. So you can't smuggle them in.
The whole thing is preposterous. But, I mean, it's like, look, we are staring down the barrel here of the worst case scenario.
If this guy will not return Garcia and the Supreme Court has directly said at a 9-0 vote that he must be returned. Like, where are we going? Right.
Or the Supreme Court at least said that the president has to do his best to facilitate, was that the word I can remember? Yeah, that's right. His return.
I don't know. We're doing this in real time, so to speak.
So I don't know exactly if the president has had a reaction to Bukele, but it doesn't sound from just the very brief account I've just looked

at that Trump is saying, oh, no, no, we are going to have to persuade you, Mr. President,

to send him back. So we're just basically have the president ignoring the district court and

the Supreme Court, which upheld, slightly modified, but upheld what the district court is now ordering

the president to at least try to do. So yeah, so all this talk about, well, that's going to be amazing when the president just defies the courts that's going to be the showdown we're there it goes back to what i was saying earlier about how like look they're pot committed on like these people being gang members and scary and dangerous and trump says these are sick people i you know not having any evidence uh later in the conversation with bukele was trying to do a question that he's open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens.

Does that include US citizens? Trump said if they're criminals, yeah, that includes them. I'm all for it.
And this like really expands the aperture of like what the what the threats are. And, you know, if we're going to be in a situation where the only way to determine if somebody's a criminal is if one ICE person or if the president decides they're a criminal, then we're really in the bad place.
And just to make this, you know, clear, it's so obvious, I suppose. It's bad enough if the ICE person decides you're a criminal, you're gone.
Gone from the country. Worse yet, if you're dumped into your home country or third country, even worse probably, where not going to be treated well let's just put it say stipulate that because you've had your encounters with the government or you're have a disfavored whatever religion or you're gay or whatever like you know you got on the wrong side of the yeah exactly but okay so that's very bad already and that's contrary to u.s law which tries to give such people asylum and so forth.
But we're way beyond that. We're literally giving them to someone who's sticking them right into a prison from which there seems to be no departure.
And which is, of course, beyond, you know, not humane and so forth. And JVL wrote a couple of weeks ago, didn't he? He's like, you know, what if he just kills some of these people? I mean, you know,, what if they have a fake trial or no trial and just decide that some of these guys is cheaper to not to have to keep them alive because they're such horrible human beings and human scum or whatever Trump would call them? I mean, is that now totally out of the realm of possibility that we would have deported people, some of whom at least are, none of whom deserves to be deported to death, I wouldn't say, in a prison without any trial or hearing or anything at all.
And some of whom are just flat out innocent of what they're sort of accused of. Yeah.
I mean, no, we're already there. And look, you have a Latin American strongman, like in the White House, mocking our judicial system, basically.
Just like mocking the country, doing it sitting next to the president with the full support of the president, the president as a sponsor, really, in a lot of ways, and discussing going further and, you know, talking about how, like, more people are going to have to be put in his jail in El Salvador. So someone resigned from the administration because of this, someone from the counsel's office, someone from DOJ, someone from the State Department.
Well, they put that one lawyer on leave. So we got one government lawyer is on leave over this.
But he's on the right side. I mean, he's on the side of telling the truth to the court.
I mean, Marco Rubio is fine with this though, right? They have succeeded, I think, in making this, what Aaron Reikland-Melnick said at the very beginning, when you and I both, I think, did conversations with him at various times, the immigration expert. They want to make America a hostile place to immigrants.
They want people not to want to come here. And they've certainly done that, and they've also made it so people don't want to stay here.
The the damage that does to us as a country and not just in sort of obvious economic ways but i think in terms of what the the meaning of the country not to sound too sappy or something but the sort of the spirit of the country what the meaning of america is i mean it's pretty terrible it's not too sappy for me my childish love of the beauty of the american experiment has been tarnished, but it's definitely true. It was noteworthy, I guess, that the Supreme Court was 9-0 on this.
And so I think that's what really makes the showdown, so to speak, most stark. Because if they don't respond to that, we're getting into an even darker place.
quick out to chris van holland senator from maryland uh who has uh requested a meeting with bukele and says that if kilmar garcia is not home by midweek he's going to travel to el salvador to check on his condition and discuss his release so glad that some democrats are standing up one last thing jv i had on this kind of point if we move on to some other cheery topics jvl kind of

had a provocative lead that i think it may be a little a little over provocative for my taste maybe but but it's something worth discussing which is if you're chris krebs right now are you starting to wonder whether or not you should leave the country jvl is more of the view that if if Garcia is not returned this week,

then,

you know,

people that have been targeted,

you know,

people that have been targeted by directly by this administration, at the very least, would have like a legit asylum case, even if they themselves don't want to go, which is another kind of crazy thing to even think about. But I don't know.
Do you think that's overcooked? I mean, I don't know. I don't think Chris Krebs wants to live in asylum from America for the rest of his life.
I don't know him that well, but he's served in the U.S. government and is a patriotic American.
So I assume he'd prefer to fight and defend himself in the American courts. And one assumes that American courts will still be reasonably fair and that one could win those cases.
The damage that could be done in terms of expenses and reputation, maybe slander and so forth in the course of bringing this case shouldn't be underestimated. So it was a little overstated.
But the fact, again, that we're having this conversation, it's not crazy. And again, the President of the United States sitting in the Oval Office signing the executive orders, It really got to me, actually, when he did that with Chris Krabs and

Miles Taylor. That's bad enough

to pop off if you're president of the United

States. This guy should be charged

with treason. That happened some of the first term

and that's happened. He's done it many, many

times on many issues throughout.

That has a real damaging effect. We shouldn't

get ourselves that erodes any concept of

rule of law. The president's

justice board shouldn't be going after personal news. To have him sign the executive order, what made me think was, someone wrote that order.
Some White House staff made sure it was, you know, correctly presented and the right citations, sort of, whatever they have, but there are some fake citations, and, you know, typed up nicely and put in that nice folder. And there was a staff guy there and I handed it to him and other people choreographed it.

People at the Justice Department

were working with people

in the White House Counsel's office.

They are all part of it.

Something that's manifestly wrong,

contrary to American principles,

arguably illegal,

but the president has immunity.

So, but we'll see what happens

when these things get to court.

But those people, I guess,

will pay no price.

I don't think the way our things work

is very hard to sue them individually

or whatever, you know.

But the number of enablers Trump has

I'm going to go ahead and do the things he's now doing. Yes, there's some ICE agents and so forth who clearly are direct enablers and don't seem to care a heck of a lot about being very careful about who they're seizing.
Someone told me who knows this area much better than I, incidentally, that I guess they have, obviously,

cooperation between ICE and other law enforcement agencies to seize these people. They're not all ICE people all the time.
But this administration assisted on ICE having the lead role. Because ICE is the least likely to be very concerned about, oh, spelling mistake, it's the wrong guy, you know? But leaving that aside, just the number of people who are cooperating with and enabling, and I'm not talking cooperating like law firms giving Trump some money.
I'm talking actually doing what's necessary, you know, to make possible the terrible injustices Trump is committing. It's kind of, I don't know, unnerving, I find.
Maybe they will find accountability in Sukkot next time that there's a Democratic president. You never know.
The other thing, just on these agents, is they also use the contractors. There's a story, I think it came out since the last pod, where the guy who signed the order for Andre, the makeup artist, was a contractor who got fired from his job as a cop in Milwaukee and who the district attorney wouldn't use in Milwaukee as a witness because his credibility was so shant because of lying.
So, you know, that's the person that signed the removal order. It's not even really a removal order.
It was signed the document kind of stating that this person is a gang. Yeah, who was like in charge of reviewing, I think, even for ICE, making sure you know who we're putting on the list here so yes exactly unfortunately very good illustration of the kinds of people who are being and it's and it gets worse i was there's the kind of people who then get attracted to this they probably can't get very good jobs hopefully with reputable law enforcement so they're now not with the i mean the old days it was the, you know, somewhere in the middle of nowhere who had the disreputable law enforcement officers, the cousins of the sheriff who were getting kickbacks and, you know, all the American novels and TV shows that are based on this kind of thing.
Now it turns out it's the federal government doing sensitive and major things that is using these people. bottles are a ridiculous 99 cents each.
That's a $7 savings on each six pack with an additional qualifying purchase of $50 or more. And green bell peppers are now just 99 cents each every day.
Join the celebration at Lucky, your neighborhood store that's fighting inflation for you every day. Berries and stores with beverage tax.
Speaking of Trump popping off, he also did a bleat over the weekend, about 60 minutes, how they should lose their license, you know, which is kind of repetitive what he's been saying, as mentioned already. I think I was watching Megan Thee Stallion during 60 minutes last night, so I haven't actually seen the show to see what upset him.
But this was the part I wanted to focus on. Hopefully, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr gives them the maximum punishment.
So again, it's similar to the Krebs situation. This isn't an executive order, but it is directing a federal agency to punish a political fell and a media outlet at that.
Yeah. And Carr has said things that are totally out of whack from any FCC chairman of either party in terms of his willingness to go after people politically.
I don't know quite how the FCC works, but I think he has a lot of power as chairman, even if they don't appoint all the members, Trump can't appoint all the members. So the threat isn't just Trump won't like you or Trump won't give CBS good access to the White House.
The threat is fines and lifting your license, and I suppose conceivably even greater, criminal penalties against people. And he mentions the person who wants to do this,

and there's Carr thinking, yeah, if I want to go and get ahead in Trump world,

I guess I need to move pretty aggressively on this.

I would have thought maybe in the first term,

Carr will just let it drop, which is what kind of the decent,

semi-decent people did in the first Trump administration

in order to do this kinds of thing.

Like, all right, boss, we're right on that.

We're right on that.

We're reviewing it, hoping it goes away. But this time, one can't count on that at all of course right no of course not also wanted to you know we have we got to do a daily tariff update i guess we're going to do much more on the economic stuff tomorrow but uh this jumped out at me since last wednesday this has been the tariff regime in the country began with the universal reciprocal tariffs quote unquote and then uh he backed down to the 10 for everybody and then upping the chinese to 50 over the course of the next few days he upped that to 90 104 125 and then 145 for the chinese tariffs then electronics were exempted now electronics on, we think, at 20%, not 100% sure, you know, on what an official announcement is out of this administration these days.
I mean, like, this is just madness. I mean, who could possibly, you know, plan their business in these kind of conditions? Right.
I think it has real bad effects economically, obviously, and I think it really will have bad effects and is having bad effects. It also just mocks any notion, again, of the rule of law.
I mean, whatever one thinks of some of these press presidential acts, you know, based on they had findings, they changed the tariffs. Sometimes they did it, you know, for sort of political reasons.
They wanted to help, you know, Harley Davidson in the Midwest or whatever in the 80s. And so

they increased tariffs on motorcycles or something. But again, there was an actual process by which they did this.
People had noticed. People were able to argue against it before the various entities.
I mean, we're now just in a total one-man rule. It's such a simple-minded way of putting it, but it's kind of correct, right? And again, the arbitrariness is in a large measure of the point.
It's a feature, not a bug. And it does mean that everyone, everyone has such an incentive to be on his good side and on his good side personally, incidentally, not on the government's good side.
I mean, that will again be, I think, a distinction I would make. And I think, didn't someone, what did I read this? It was a CBS that someone went to them as a middleman, I think, you know, from Trump to say, well, the way you might get out of this, do what in effect, I guess it was Amazon did with Melania Trump, right? Gave her $40 million for some documentary, give Don Jr.
a show about hunting. And, you know, there are things you could, but it's all personal, right? It's not, it's not even accommodate the government's policies, which is problematic enough in a free country, obviously.
It's accommodate, you know, the strongman's, not policies, accommodate the strongman's interests and family and friends, I suppose. He gave the Mexico and Canada tariffs like some fake pretense with the fentanyl, you know, that there was an emergency rationale for that.
Like, that's not even happening anymore, right? Like, he doesn't even feel the need to do that. It's just, he's licking his finger, putting in the air, and just picking a number.
And we kind of did this last week, but the congressional abdication is just totally complete. Like, you know, a lot of chatter, like some chatter, but no actual action.
I mean, here's Dan Crenshaw, who is, you might remember, got into a lengthy debate with me before the election, where he, his side of the debate was that it was going to look just like the first term, that Trump was going to have people around him that were tough on Russia,, you know, wanted free market economics. Anyway, here's Crenshaw now.
See, question mark, trust the president. He understands trade and economics and negotiations better than his critics give him credit for.
The critiques from certain Senate Republicans were premature, to say the least. So you have one of the supposedly more responsible ones chastising the few of his colleagues who have even done the minimum to express concern about this moronic policy.
No, I think it's so revealing. I hadn't seen the Kredscher thing until you texted me just half an hour ago.
I mean, he tries to be, and he is sort of one of the more responsible, less, you know, Kool-Aid drinking Trump Republicans on the Hill. He sort of knows better.
That's why he cares when you criticize him. And he sort of reads or watches the book work some enough to get annoyed at us and so forth.
And there he is, as you say, criticizing the very few Senate Republicans who actually said a few words against this.

It makes me wonder if there's a broader phenomenon.

I was thinking about this the last few days because I haven't randomly seen a whole lot of people, some of whom are much more in touch with Trump-adjacent Republicans or certainly anti-Trump Republicans than I am. And what struck me talking to them is these are, I was well-educated and sort of these would be the people, the Dan Crenshaw equivalents, let's put it this way, in business and in journalism and in other sectors.
I don't think they've changed their mind. I guess in the polls as a whole, there's clearly some erosion for Trump, which is good, I think.
But I don't know that the erosion is coming among the upper middle class Wall Street Journal reader Trump supporters as much as one would assume it would, of and the journal itself is a little different but is eroding i think but i don't know i think the emotion may be coming from quote normal people actually less well-informed voters who are just looking around and saying this looks crazy you know or these terrorists i think they're going to raise prices and so it turns out the people who have the complicated reasons for justifying trump i don't know impression is 95% of them are still doing so. Have you sensed this at all? No.
So back in thinking about 2016, right, like between election day and say the Muslim ban implementation, you know, kind of like that, the early period in 2016, I had a lot of people in our old world do like the whispering i was with you you know what i mean are you right about that or oh i don't we got we i didn't really think he could win like i got all all those kinds of things and that has not happened this time i mean some of that is just that i'm like less in those circles than i was eight years ago but i agree with you i've not seen any evidence of it and i think it's like look once you've concocted some complicated rationale for you know being for it like in for a penny in for a pound i guess you know it becomes easier to you know continue to rationalize i don't i don't know so someone told me that someone else said this who's an intelligent person who my friend respects said it's terrible much worse than we could have expected no no it's the terrorist is bad that was terrible last week and a half has been bad but before that it was all fine so i mean let's think for a minute about what that says and this isn't a stupid person or an ignorant person or someone who in a normal world wouldn't think gee doesn't couldn't care less about ukraine couldn't care less about civil liberties etc and that stuff'sists was a little too much. But in a way, the focus on tariffs almost makes the point, doesn't it, that all the other stuff somehow didn't move anyone, I guess.
Yeah. The appointment of a TV host to run the military and a total quack to run our health and human services, that part was no big deal.
No worries there. It was just the tariffs that started to get me concerned the kennedy thing is i actually also found that driving me a little crazy late last week that i mean hexeth and patel are really awful i think in terms of what they can do to the country and ludicrously unqualified and all that but as we said at the time that they are were republicans they were fox news You could sort of see why Republican senators were a little hesitant to go against them.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., there was none of that.
It was Trump's personal deal with him, but Trump could have said if he had been not confirmed in the Senate, well, I kept my part of the deal. I can't control these creeps.
You can attack them all you want, Bobby. The fact that he's in there, and incidentally, there hasn't been a huge outrage about all the stuff he's doing and saying.
He's actually running a kind of big and important department that does a lot of big and important things, and he's running it terribly, just as we all feared. And again, that that's been normalized is really, I don't know, amazing, I think.
This guy is Secretary of Health and Human Services in America in 2025. With all that we know about medicine and science and so forth, it's really kind of unbelievable.
He's got a lot of apartheid checks in there, too, at HHS, right? Because I don't know if you saw the interview with him last week. Basically, some interviewer was asking him about the specifics of the cuts.
because there have been like draconian cuts in HHS to a lot of things that you know just like

research and other kind of core services that the government needs to provide and and he was just like i don't know about that i don't know i didn't know but i didn't approve that i didn't approve that you know it's like he is doing the kind of media you know public facing side of it and creating some real damage there with his measles, with the measles outbreak, et cetera. But then behind the scenes, like they've got a whole little squad, both of Doge and Maha people that are like tearing the department apart.
That sound? It's lucky cutting prices on over 4,000 items across our stores. We cut prices, not corners.
Same quality, much lower prices on what matters most to your family. This week, 7-Up, A&W, and other select six-pack bottles are a ridiculous 99 cents each.
That's a $7 savings on each six-pack, with an additional qualifying purchase of $50 or more. And Green Bell peppers are now just 99 cents each, every day.
Join the celebration at Lucky, your neighborhood store that's fighting inflation for you every day. Berries and stores with beverage tax.
I wanted to go back to Putin really quick because we had a sad update over the weekend. On Palm Sunday, Russia killed at least 34 and wounded 117 in the city of Sumi, the missile attacks.
Trump was asked about it. He called it a mistake.
The reporter followed up again and asked him to clarify that. And he just was like, it was a mistake.
They made a mistake. And then later sent out a bleat that said that Zelensky and crooked Joe Biden did a horrible job letting this war begin.
So it's been almost a month since we've had these, you know, partial ceasefire deal, which included attacks on energy and infrastructure, which Putin has continued to attack.

So it doesn't feel like we've got a lot of progress there on the Russia front.

And I guess unless you're rooting for Russia, then maybe they're having some progress.

I think this is one of the worst attacks on civilians in maybe the entire war.

It came, what, a day after Trump's buddy there, his envoy. Witko incompetence straight but whitkoff was there being so moved by having met putin and really loves putin and and and looking just so craved in the photo i really my made my skin crawl the the video of that you know let's make everybody's skin crawl and take a listen what did you think

of him i i liked him yep i thought he was straight up with me of course by the way i've said that and you know you can imagine by the way i say that i get pilloried oh my gosh you mean you you're actually called communication which many people would would say you know i shouldn't have because Putin is a bad guy.

I don't regard Putin as a bad guy.

That is a complicated situation, that war, and all the ingredients that led up to it. You know, it's never just one person, right? So I think we're going to figure it out.
No, it's just one person. It's not a complicated situation.
He invaded Ukraine. There's not a lot of ins and outs and what have yous into this war and the circumstances around it.

You had to say nothing of all the other people he's killed and put into gulags at home and so forth.

I mean, it is just unbelievable, really.

This is not a kind of random third-level person.

It's not a, if it were the Biden administration, it's a left-wing activist on campus said this.

The entire Fox News and the right wing would go crazy and you know this is what the democratic party this is literally the president's negotiator with putin who turns out to be i don't know more pro-putin than what henry wallace was with stalin right i mean it's unbelievable yeah like lavish praise just like i thought he was really straight with me it's like how can you be so fucking stupid by the way honestly like just like the credulousness and the gullibility like if it wasn't so serious would be the funniest aspect of it because like really we're 20 years into this it became a joke like the way that w looked into his soul like we've we've been through this. Like, that was 20 years ago.
Like, you haven't learned anything? Anyway. That sound? It's lucky cutting prices on over 4,000 items across our stores.
We cut prices, not corners. Same quality, much lower prices on what matters most to your family.
This week, 7Up, A&W, and other select six-pack bottles are a ridiculous 99 cents each. That's a $7 savings on each six-pack with an additional qualifying purchase of $50 or more.
And Green Bell Peppers are now just 99 cents each every day. Join the celebration at Lucky, your neighborhood store that's fighting inflation for you every day.
Berries and stores with beverage tax. I want to kind of close here with two things.
She had a nice newsletter on trust that I want to play a clip from at the end.

But I thought Richie Torres really summarized the state of affairs pretty well.

And so I wanted to read that to you.

He wrote this this morning. If a superpower were intent on engineering its own decline, it would antagonize its allies, paralyze its economy with the certainty of uncertainty, erode confidence in the world's reserve currency, discard due process, defund medical and scientific research, sabotage the most critical form of manufacturing, domestic chip making, and grow its deficit until debt service devours the largest share of its budget.
You would think, I guess, going back to the people we were talking about earlier, you would think a succinct summary such as that would resonate with some of our old friends. I mean, that could have been a Mitt Romney statement in 2012, really.
I know it wouldn't have been about the current president. It would have been a speculative, but he's not advancing any far-left progressive woke notions there.
And it's just the basics. And I think he kind of hit it.
That was great. None of our ex-friends will, of course, can praise it because they can't be on board with the full-bore criticism of Trump, apparently.
I guess I just come back to that and how terrible it is. That is, I mean, people might have said at this point, and some have, a few have, I guess, I was wrong.
There have been a few actually random people online, not the people I would have predicted necessarily, some people I don't, you know, haven't thought that much of, which is sort of did kind of have this moment of, oh, my God, you know, but the people who allegedly we've all said to ourselves, and they've privately sometimes said to us, well, we know better, and this and this, we wouldn't go this far, of course, but you know, I think we could help at this point help at this point nothing nothing yeah it takes richie torres who's a good guy don't get me wrong but a democratic elected official to say what all the people at the free press and commentary and all these other estimable journals of opinion but also the business leaders none of them could say that right the business leaders can say wish there'd been a little more consistency in the way they've done this terrorist stuff. But I'm not criticizing, I'm not complaining about anything else.
God forbid they should say anything about the collapse of the rule of law here in the United States of America. Okay, well, so the superpower engineering its own decline.
And while that is happening, here was the White House press secretary on Friday talking to people that might have concerns. So trust in President Trump.
He knows what he's doing. This is a proven economic formula.
What is he asking of Americans at this time? He talked about transition costs, transition problems. Is he asking something specific for Americans to do? No, I think the president is asking for Americans.
Trust in Trump, as I just said, trust in his economic agenda and formula. It's a proven formula that works.
Trust in Trump. Trust in Trump.
There was Crenshaw again. Trust the president.
You had a little meditation on that this morning. What, uh.
You know, I hadn't realized, as you read it, I heard the trust word. I hadn't even realized Crenshaw had said that.
I should have added that to my little meditation in morning shots. Well, no, just, I mean, we used to believe in God we trust, and that's appropriate.
But the flip side of that, the implicit message of that is we don't trust human beings. We don't trust dear leaders too much.
Our whole system is set up based on a kind of distrust of that. That's why we have checks and balances and separation of powers and the like.
But now we're supposed to, in the era of Trump, but just a nice, it's a terrible encapsulation of authoritarianism and bad authoritarianism, not even kind of a certain type of authoritarianism where, look, you don't have to love this government, just shut up and obey the rules. That's kind of what we're used to in certain countries.
We're not for that. That's not America.
But people can kind of still live their lives to some degree if they don't bother butting into politics. We're supposed to trust the guy.
And we are really just one step from being ordered to love the guy and sort of pay and bow to him, which in fact, a lot of that is being asked, of course, of a lot of people, right? I mean, it's cultish. Yeah.
And imagine some of those law firms that are having to do pro bono work for them. Who knows the kind of good stuff that they're doing? I wonder how that's going to really work out in practice.
Because they all think, I talked to a couple of lawyers as it happens in various things over the weekend. You know, they all kind of, I mean, they don't work for those firms, but they know people obviously do.
And their own firms may be facing these choices. And they all think they're going to fudge it and they'll do some work for, you know, some decent, semi-decent cause that's sort of Trump adjacent though.
And so, you know, they'll get away with fulfilling the pro bono work that way. But I don't know that we know that at all.
I presume these agreements are memorialized somewhere. I don't think we've seen any of these agreements.
Who's going to judge? Do we think Trump's just going to let the law firm show up and say, hey, did $8 million in pro bono work for you this last six months? You know, yeah, it's all fine. It's good stuff.
Don't worry about it, Mr. President.
You know what? They'll tell his representative. We don't think the representative is going to say, I want to see who you were doing the work for.
Furthermore, next six months, I want you to do work for the following five individuals or groups who we think have been treated badly. And those groups could be very

bad, creepy groups, right? You know, these Holocaust, these Holocaust deniers were shut up. Some, you know, didn't get treated equally.
Someone, some, God knows, right, on some campus, and we want you to be helping them. And I don't know.
He floated the coal companies last week as a possible group that lawyers will have to do work for. So good luck with that and the greenwashing program at the law firm.
All right, Bill, anything else? Did I miss anything? We should end that slightly up. I mean, I will say this.
I do think the tariffs is hurt, even though I'm griping about how they should be rebelling on 10 issues, not just one. And I do think the Richie Torres statement and others statements like that show some of the Democrats are more in a fighting mood than they were.
I think Sarah found that from those two focus groups she did this week and had a good discussion on the podcast, including what has been a gripe of yours that I very much agree with, that the progressives seem willing to fight, but but the moderates not so much. But in these focus groups, the moderates

and the progressives were equally

sort of aggressive and wanting

their representatives to be aggressive against

Trump. So maybe all of that is getting

a little bit better, I think, than it

was. Okay, I'm not going to let you end on a high note.

I've got to end on a low note because I forgot to talk about

one other thing. The governor

of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, was an

arson in his home last night. Very serious.
When I first saw it, I thought, until I saw the pictures, I guess, of the governor's mansion, I didn't realize it was a very serious attack by somebody that, I guess, hopped the fence. They had homemade incendiary devices.
I mean, obviously, the attack was targeted, but they haven't released a specific motive yet. So it also was, I guess, at the time of the Passover Seder.
Is that right? This is your area. It was Sunday morning.
So it was after the first Seder. And there had been some publicity around that Seder, that publicity, but he put out a photo of his family and some friends at the Seder dinner.
So maybe that's, you know, even more, provoke this guy even more, but he seems to hate Shapiro. And yeah, maybe he shouldn't be able to jump the fence to the governor's house and get inside at 2 a.m.
But whatever, I'm sure they'll look at security again. No, it's terrible.
And again, you know, you can't blame it directly on Trump, I suppose, and all this. But the atmosphere of vigilante violence that's out there, failure of trump i guess personally to say anything about it is that correct as we speak at least uh here late warning on monday i believe that's true that he's not a governor of a major state is uh you know subjected to a dangerous attack and there's not the routine kind of expression of concern from the president's trump mom on shapiro is about an hour ago according to usa today so we'll be waiting with bated breath i'm sure he'll give a very generous statement of support from the white house bill crystal uplifting as always sorry about that next week next week no no who people don't come here to be uplifted okay there are other there are other

podcasts in the sea years from now four years from now cheerful podcast every once in a while

we'll do a schadenfreude podcast every once in a while all right everybody i'll be back here

tomorrow and look forward to seeing y'all then peace More unanna, apra kutabra, orta ugaga

Phantom of the dance, flowed onto me

Sing for me, I'm singing full melody Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I broke the zebra Oh, I forgot that bro Abra Kadabra, Abra Kadabra

Abra Kadabra, Abra Kadabra

Feel them under your face

What's on fire?

Abra Kadabra, Abra Kadabra

Abra Kadabra, I'm on Unana

Abra Kadabra, Mortal Uga Ga Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, on unanna Abra Kedabra, or the UGAGA

Abra Kedabra, Abra Kedabra

Abra Kedabra, Abra Kedabra The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. That sound? It's lucky cutting prices on over 4,000 items across our stores.
We cut prices, not corners. Same quality, much lower prices on what matters most to your family.
This week, 7-Up, A&W, and other select six-pack bottles are a ridiculous 99 cents each.

That's a $7 savings on each six-pack, with an additional qualifying purchase of $50 or more.

And Green Bell Peppers are now just 99 cents each, every day.

Join the celebration at Lucky, your neighborhood store that's fighting inflation for you every day.

Berries and stores with beverage tax.