S2 Ep1020: Bill Kristol: Staring Down the Barrel

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Speaker 5 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 from? Made it easy on him.

Speaker 5 Congrats also to my brother from another mother, Rory McElroy, on the Masters win. Big ups to listeners, Josh and Jason, for the little bonus hospitality at Coachella.

Speaker 5 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 Crystal, as is our habit on Mondays.
How you doing, Bill?

Speaker 3 I'm doing fine. How are you? How was Cochella?

Speaker 5 It was amazing. It was just so marvelous.
Everyone was happy. Gaga was just completely on another level from all the other acts.
But,

Speaker 5 you know, we saw a lot of good ones. Amare, Viagra Boys.

Speaker 3 I think I would have trouble dealing with all that happiness. But

Speaker 3 you're a better person than I, and

Speaker 3 you can turn off the

Speaker 3 world around us and enjoy the happiness for a weekend.

Speaker 5 I completely turned it off.

Speaker 5 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 artists, but did like a three-minute, you know, anti-Trump rant.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Speaking of our dark reality, I guess we need to start in El Salvador, which David From repeatedly called our only ally on the Friday font, to my amusement.

Speaker 5 Close enough to true. So we've got President Bukele in D.C.
today. I guess we'll be meeting with Trump.

Speaker 5 The latest in the legal situation with Kilmar Obrego-Garcia, that's the father in Maryland who was wrongfully sent to Sakat in El Salvador.

Speaker 5 On Sunday, the government stonewalled the district court judge filing an update saying it had no updates.

Speaker 5 And in a separate filing, challenged the Supreme Court's 9-0 order to facilitate Obrego-Garcia's return and added that the details of the deal with Bukele

Speaker 5 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 I know tickles both of our funny bones.

Speaker 5 But what do you make of it at the biggest picture?

Speaker 3 It's terrible. It's terrible what's happened.
It's terrible that the government of the United States and the representatives of the Trump administration are,

Speaker 3 I guess, defending what's happened or at least professing to be incapable of fixing what's happened or certainly not trying at all hard or even appearing to try hard to fix what's happened.

Speaker 3 That part I really can't quite believe, you know, I can believe, what am I saying? But that part is shocking, you know, in a sense.

Speaker 3 I mean, of course, what's happened is the most shocking thing, but not even sort of going through the motions of trying to fix what they have acknowledged is an injustice, a wrong, which of course they could fix in two minutes.

Speaker 3 I know Bukeley's not going to say no to Trump if he says it's important to get him back. And

Speaker 3 we'll do it in some way that saves space for you if you want. But anyway,

Speaker 3 that's not a bug. That's a feature, right? The unwillingness to rectify the injustice.

Speaker 5 Yeah, oh, no, for sure. And I think there is kind of a typical political scandal element to this.

Speaker 5 And obviously Trump is atypical in so many ways, but they've gotten just way out ahead of themselves with their rhetoric about, well, you know, like this guy is a, you know, MS-13 member, you know, everyone down there is a violent, dangerous criminal.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You keep digging the hole deeper. But it's like, once they do, then doesn't that open the door? And God willing it would, to like for the other, you know, people who are there that may be wrongfully.

Speaker 5 It's just, this just happens to be the only guy they've admitted was a mistake.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And any, you know, they like it with the immigrants. Clearly, they like that.
They think it'll lead to self-deportation, or at least, well, self-deportation, or

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 You know, I mean, the stuff does have a deterrent and chilling effect. And not just on immigrants, incidentally.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 You want some cases that are obviously unjust to really put the fear of God into everyone. They can't do anything that even looks problematic from the point of view of the government.

Speaker 3 And that seems to be where we are.

Speaker 5 And this, I think, is just a reasonable fear.

Speaker 5 Particularly for people that are here on visas, screen, you know, like anybody whose status is not permanent. residency, you know, or citizen, obviously.

Speaker 5 I don't think I would advise somebody, you know, in that shoes to like come or stay in the country because the risks are so great.

Speaker 5 And an email from a listener just this morning I was reading where his son's roommate

Speaker 5 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 to just go back.

Speaker 5 And like, that seems like a rational choice.

Speaker 5 In this case, he got a letter. But even if you, if you didn't, right? And like, they want that fear.
And I don't think it's irrational at this point.

Speaker 3 Right. At least he got the letter, which is more than the

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And there, too, they're doing nothing to remedy the error. So.

Speaker 5 Well, the Tufts 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.

Speaker 5 Like, 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.

Speaker 5 That was like the State Department's own internal assessment.

Speaker 3 And it may be that legally, it's just, you know, immigrants don't have many rights, honestly, and

Speaker 3 their visas can be revoked. And

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Maybe the current provisions are unconstitutional in terms of their arbitrariness, but if I'm reading the current provisions correctly.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, we're so far down the road of, 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.

Speaker 3 We've forgotten the more elementary fact that you shouldn't be doing any of this. There's absolutely no need for it.

Speaker 3 It's entirely unprovoked and setting up a terrible system where people don't feel they can speak up.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Now, maybe you can say, okay, well, we'll live in a country where they won't express their opinions, I guess.

Speaker 3 And what if you're a student in a classroom, a student in grad school, and you're asked to join a, I mean, leave aside protests and all that.

Speaker 3 I'm just thinking of, you know, writing an article on something or whatever, you know?

Speaker 5 Listen, like in the past week or two, I've been having crazy conversations with, I had 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.

Speaker 5 And their lawyer told them, like, bring a burner phone,

Speaker 5 like, like we're in Russia, you know, because it's just like, better safe than sorry.

Speaker 5 You know, you don't want them going through your phone, like, bring a clean phone that doesn't have any memes on it that might, you know, come afoul of the, you know, agents at the airport.

Speaker 5 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.

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Speaker 5 Just on the legal part of this, because JVL

Speaker 5 kind of wrote about basically the three doors that we're going to come through here with Bukele in the U.S.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 pike.

Speaker 5 Or 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.

Speaker 5 All right, and actually, we might have a little bit of clarity on which dark door we're going through.

Speaker 5 Because as we are taping here, the press conference is happening live in the Oval Office with Bukele and Trump.

Speaker 5 And here is what Bukele just said about whether he's planning on returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Speaker 6 Can President Bukele weigh in on this?

Speaker 5 Do you plan to return him?

Speaker 7 Well, I I guess I'm supposed to have not suggested that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right?

Speaker 7 How can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States or what do I do? Of course, I'm not going to do it. It's like,

Speaker 7 I mean,

Speaker 7 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.
You could release him inside of Slavo.

Speaker 7 Yeah, but I'm not releasing. I mean, we're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.

Speaker 7 I mean, you just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country of the Western Hemisphere, and you want us to go back into the releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world.

Speaker 7 That's not going to happen.

Speaker 7 Well, they'd love to have a criminal, you know, released into our criminal capital.

Speaker 7 I mean, there's a fascination. They would love it.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 These are sick people.

Speaker 5 So he 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

Speaker 5 Garcia and

Speaker 5 the Supreme Court has directly said at a 9-0 vote that he must be returned.

Speaker 3 Like, where are we going?

Speaker 3 Right, or the Supreme Court at least said that the president has to do his best to facilitate, was that the word I can.

Speaker 3 I don't know. We're doing this in real time, so to speak.

Speaker 3 So I don't know exactly if the president has a reaction to Pukele, but it doesn't sound from just the very brief account I just looked at that Trump is saying, oh, no, no, we are going to have to persuade you, Mr.

Speaker 3 President, to send him back.

Speaker 3 So we 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.

Speaker 3 So, yeah. So, all this talk about, oh, well, it's going to be amazing when the president justifies the courts.
That's going to be the showdown.

Speaker 3 We're there.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I can, you know, not having any evidence. Later in the conversation with Bukele, Trump was trying to do a question that he's open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens.

Speaker 5 Does that include U.S. citizens? Trump said if they're criminals, yeah, that includes them.
I'm all for it.

Speaker 5 And this, like, really expands the aperture of like what the th what the threats are. And, you know, if we're going to be in a situation where

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 3 And just to make this, you know, clear, so obvious, I suppose, it's bad enough if the ICE person decides you're a criminal, you're gone. Gone from the country.

Speaker 3 Worse yet, if you're dumped into your home country or third country, even worse probably, where you're 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 have a disfavored whatever religion or you're gay or whatever.

Speaker 5 Like, you know, you got on the wrong side of the

Speaker 3 exactly. Because 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.

Speaker 3 We're literally giving him to someone who's sticking him 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.

Speaker 3 And JVL wrote a couple of weeks ago, didn't he? He's something, you know, what if he just kills some of these people?

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, what if they have a fake fake trial or no trial and just decide that some of these guys, it's cheaper to not have to keep them alive because they are such horrible human beings and human scum or whatever Trump would call them.

Speaker 3 I mean, is that now totally out of the realm of possibility that we and that we would have deported people,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I mean, no, we're already there.

Speaker 5 And look, you have a Latin American strongman 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.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 discussing going further and, you know, talking about how like more people are going to have to be put in his

Speaker 5 jail in El Salvador. So.

Speaker 3 Someone resigned from the administration because of this, someone from the council's office, someone from DOJ, someone from the State Department.

Speaker 5 Well, they put that one lawyer on leave. So we got one government lawyer is on leave over this.

Speaker 3 But he's on the right side. I mean, he's on this side of telling the truth to the court.
I mean,

Speaker 3 Marco Rubio is fine with this, though, right?

Speaker 3 They have succeeded, I think, in making this what Aaron Reichland Melnick said at the very beginning, when you and I both, I think, did conversations with him at various times, the immigration expert.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 5 It's not too sappy for me.

Speaker 5 My childish love of the beauty of the American experiment has

Speaker 5 been tarnished, but it's definitely true. It was noteworthy, I guess, that the Supreme Court was 9-0 on this.

Speaker 5 And so I think that's what really makes the showdown, so to speak, most stark, right? Because if they don't respond to that,

Speaker 5 we're getting into

Speaker 5 an even darker place.

Speaker 5 Quick shout out to Chris Van Holland, sender from Maryland, who has 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.

Speaker 5 So glad that some Democrats are standing up. One last thing, JVL, on this kind of point, before we move on to some other cheery topics.

Speaker 5 JVL kind of had a provocative lead that I think is maybe a little over-provocative for my taste, maybe,

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 JVL is more of the view that if Garcia is not returned returned this week, then

Speaker 5 people that have been targeted by directly by this administration,

Speaker 5 at the very least, would have 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?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 government and is a patriotic American. So I assume he'd prefer to fight and defend himself in the American courts.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 reputation, maybe slander and so forth in the course of bringing this case shouldn't be underestimated. So it was a little overstated.

Speaker 3 The fact, again, that we're having this conversation, it's not crazy.

Speaker 3 I mean, 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 Boss Taylor.

Speaker 3 That's bad enough to pop off if you're president of the United States. This guy should be charged with treason.
That happened somewhere in the first term and that's happened.

Speaker 3 And he's done it many, many times on many issues throughout. And that has a real damaging effect.
We shouldn't get ourselves it erodes any concept of the rule of law.

Speaker 3 The president's justice board shouldn't go after personalities. To have him sign the executive order, what it made me think was someone wrote that order.

Speaker 3 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 to hand it to him and other people choreographed it and 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 who 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.

Speaker 3 But the number of enablers Trump has to be able to do the things he's now doing.

Speaker 3 Yes, there's some ICE agents and so forth who clearly are direct enablers and don't seem to be care a heck of a lot about being very careful about who they're seizing.

Speaker 3 Someone told me who knows this area much better than I, incidentally, that I guess they have obviously cooperation between ICE and other parts, other law enforcement agencies to seize these people.

Speaker 3 They're not all ICE people all the time. But this administration insisted on ICE having the lead role.

Speaker 3 ICE is the least likely to be very concerned about, oh, spelling mistake. It's the wrong guy, you know.

Speaker 3 But leaving that aside, just the number of people who are cooperating with and enabling, and I'm not talking cooperating like the law firms giving Trump some money. I'm talking actually

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 There's a story, I think it came out since The Last Pod, where the guy who

Speaker 5 signed the order for Andry, the makeup artist, was like 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 shot because of lying.

Speaker 5 So, you know, that's the person person that signed the removal order. It's not even really a removal order, signed the document kind of stating that this person is again.

Speaker 3 Yeah, who was like in charge of reviewing, I think, even for ICE, sort of making sure, you know, who we're putting on the list here. So, yes, exactly.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, a very good illustration of the kinds of people who are being attracted.

Speaker 3 And it gets worse. There's the kind of people who then get attracted to this.
They probably

Speaker 3 can't get very good jobs, hopefully, with reputable law enforcement.

Speaker 3 So they're now not with the, I mean, in the old days, it was the small towns, you you know, somewhere in the middle of nowhere who had the disreputable law enforcement officers, the cousins of the sheriff who are getting kickbacks and, you know, all the American novels and TV shows that are based on this kind of thing.

Speaker 3 Now it turns out it's the federal government doing sensitive and major things that is

Speaker 3 using these people.

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Speaker 5 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 kind of repetitive what he's been saying as mentioned already i think i was watching megan the 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 is isn't an executive order but it is directing a federal agency to punish a political foe and a media outlet at that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I don't know quite how the agency 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.

Speaker 3 So the threat isn't just Trump won't like you or Trump won't give CBS good access to the White House.

Speaker 3 The threat is, you know, fines and lifting your license, and I suppose conceivably even greater criminal penalties against people. And he mentions the person he wants to do this.

Speaker 3 And there's Carr Carr thinking, yeah, if I want to go get ahead in the Trump world, I guess I need to move pretty aggressively on this.

Speaker 3 I would have thought of 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 when ordered to do this kind of thing.

Speaker 5 Like, all right, boss, we're right on that. We're right on that.
We're reviewing it, you know, and hoping it goes away.

Speaker 3 But this time, one can't count on that at all, of course, right?

Speaker 5 No, of course not. Also, wanted to, you know, we got to do a daily tariff update.
I guess we're going to do much more on the economic stuff tomorrow. But

Speaker 5 this jumped out at me. Since last Wednesday, this has been the tariff regime in the country.

Speaker 5 It began with the universal reciprocal tariffs, quote unquote, and then he backed down to the 10% for everybody, and then upping the Chinese to 50%.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Now electronics are back 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.

Speaker 5 I mean, who could possibly

Speaker 5 plan their business in these kind of conditions?

Speaker 3 Right. I think it has real economic bad effects economically, obviously.
And I think it really will have bad effects. It is having bad effects.

Speaker 3 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 had findings, they changed the tariff.

Speaker 3 Sometimes they did it, you know, for sort of political reasons. They wanted to help

Speaker 3 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 notice.

Speaker 3 People were able to argue against it before the various entities. I mean, we're now just in a total one-man,

Speaker 3 well, I mean, one-man rule. It's such a simple-minded way of putting it, but it's kind of correct, right? I mean, and

Speaker 3 again, the arbitrariness is in a large measure the point.

Speaker 3 It's a feature at Otterbug. 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.

Speaker 3 That would again be, I think, a distinction I would make. And I think, didn't someone, what did I read this?

Speaker 3 It was the CBS that someone went to them as a middleman, I think, 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?

Speaker 3 Gave her $40 million for for some documentary. Give Don Jr.
a show about hunting. And, you know, there are things you could do, but it's all personal, right?

Speaker 3 It's not even accommodate the government's policies, which is problematic enough in a free country, obviously.

Speaker 3 It's accommodate, you know, the strong man's, not policies, accommodate the strong man's interests and family and friends, I suppose.

Speaker 5 Aaron Ross Powell, he gave the... Mexico and Canada tariffs like some fake pretense with the fentanyl, you know, that there was an emergency rationale for that.

Speaker 3 Like, that's not even happening anymore, right?

Speaker 5 Like he doesn't even feel the need to do that. It's just, he's licking his finger, putting it in the air and just picking a number.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 no actual action. I mean, here's Dan Crenshaw.

Speaker 5 who is,

Speaker 5 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 and

Speaker 5 that Trump was going to have people around him that were tough on Russia and

Speaker 5 wanted free market economics. Anyway, here's Crenshaw now.
C, question mark, trust the president. He understands trade and economics and negotiations better than his critics give him credit for.

Speaker 5 The critiques from certain Senate Republicans were premature, to say the least. So here you have one of the supposedly more responsible ones chastising

Speaker 5 the few of his colleagues who have even done the minimum to express concern about this moronic policy.

Speaker 3 No, I think it's so revealing. I didn't see the Credita thing until you texted to me just half an hour ago.

Speaker 3 He

Speaker 3 tries to be, and he is sort of one of the more responsible, less, you know,

Speaker 3 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 bulwarks

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It makes me wonder if there's a broader phenomenon. I was thinking about this the last few days because I happen to

Speaker 3 randomly sort of have seen a whole bunch of

Speaker 3 people, some of whom are

Speaker 3 much more in touch with Trump-adjacent Republicans or certainly anti-anti-Trump Republicans than I am.

Speaker 3 And what struck me talking to them is these are, I was well-educated and sort of, these would be the people, the Dan Crenchau equivalents, let's put it this way,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 course.

Speaker 3 And the journal itself is a little different, but is eroding, I think. But I don't know.

Speaker 3 I think the erosion 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.

Speaker 3 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.
My impression is 95% of them are still doing so.

Speaker 3 Do you, have you sensed this at all, or am I just at all? No.

Speaker 5 So back in thinking about 2016, right? Like between

Speaker 5 Election Day and

Speaker 5 say the Muslim ban implementation, you know, kind of like that, this early period in 2016, I had a lot of people in our old world do like the whispering,

Speaker 5 I was with you, you know what I mean? Or you were right about that, or ooh, I don't, we got, we, I didn't really think he could win. Like, I got all those kinds of things.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 3 I don't know. So someone told me that someone else said this, who was an intelligent person, who my friend respects, said, that's terrible, much worse than we could have expected.

Speaker 3 No, no, the tariffs is bad. That was terrible.
Last week and a half has been bad. Before that, it was all fine.
So, I mean, let's think for a minute about what that says.

Speaker 3 And this isn't a stupid person or an ignorant person or someone who, in a normal world, wouldn't think, gee, couldn't care less about Ukraine, couldn't care less about civil liberties, et cetera.

Speaker 3 And that stuff's all fine. Tariffs 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 No worries there. It was just the tariffs that started to get me concerned.

Speaker 3 The Kennedy thing is, I actually also found that driving me a little crazy late last week.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But as we said at the time, they are Republicans, they were Fox News. You could sort of see why Republican senators were a little hesitant to go against them.
Robert F.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 is really,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 5 He's got a lot of apar chicks in there, too, at HHS, right? Because I don't know, you saw the interview with him last week. Basically, some interviewer was asking him

Speaker 5 about the specifics of the cuts.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 there with his measles, with the measles outbreak, et cetera.

Speaker 5 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.

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Speaker 5 I wanted to go back to Putin really quick because we had a update, a sad update over the weekend. On Palm Sunday, Russia killed at least 34 and wounded 117 in the city of Sumi with missile attacks.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And then later sent out a bleat that said that Zelensky and crooked Joe Biden did a horrible job letting this war begin.

Speaker 5 So it's been almost a month since we've had the partial ceasefire deal, which included attacks on energy and infrastructure, which Putin has continued to attack.

Speaker 5 So it doesn't feel like we got a lot of progress there on the Russian front. And I guess guess unless you're rooting for Russia, then maybe they're having some progress.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, 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

Speaker 3 wife. Well, he's utter incompetence straight.
But Witkoff was there being so moved by having met Putin and really loves Putin and looking just so craven.

Speaker 3 He really

Speaker 3 made my skin crawl, the video of that.

Speaker 5 Let's make everybody's skin crawl and take a lesson.

Speaker 3 What did you think of him?

Speaker 3 I liked him.

Speaker 3 I thought he was straight up with me. Of course, by the way, I've said that.
And

Speaker 3 you can imagine, by the way, I say that, I get pilloried. Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 3 You're actually. It's something called communication,

Speaker 3 which many people would say,

Speaker 3 you know, I shouldn't have had 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.

Speaker 3 You know, it's never just one person, right? So we're going to, I think we're going to figure it out.

Speaker 5 No, it's just one person. It's not a complicated situation.
He invaded Ukraine. What is like, there's not a lot of ins and outs and what have-us into this war and the circumstances around it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, to say nothing of all the other people he's killed and, you know, and put into gulags at home and so forth. I mean, it's, it is just unbelievable, really.

Speaker 3 This is not a kind of random third-level person. It's not a, if it were the Biden administration, some left-wing activists on campus said this, the entire Fox News and the right-wing would go crazy.

Speaker 3 And, you know, this is what the Democratic Party said.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Like, lavish praise. It's like, I thought he was really straight with me.
It's like, how can you be so fucking stupid, by the way?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It became a joke, like the way that W looked into his soul. Like, we've been through this.
Like, that was 20 years ago. Like, you haven't learned anything?

Speaker 3 Anyway.

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Speaker 5 I want to kind of close here with two things. You had a nice newsletter on

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 5 wanted to read that to you. He wrote this this morning.

Speaker 5 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 shipmaking, and grow its deficit until debt service devours the largest share of its budget.

Speaker 5 You would think, I guess going back to the people we were talking about earlier, earlier, you would think a succinct summary such as that would

Speaker 5 resonate with some of our old friends.

Speaker 5 I mean, that could have been a Mitt Romney statement in 2012, really.

Speaker 5 It wouldn't have been about the current president. It would have been a spicit of it.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 3 That was great. None of our ex-friends will, of course, can praise it because they can't be on board with a full-blow criticism of Trump, apparently.

Speaker 3 I guess I just come back to that and how terrible it is. I mean, people might have said at this point, and some have, a few have, I guess, I was wrong.

Speaker 3 There have been a few actually random people online.

Speaker 3 Not the people I would have predicted necessarily, some people I don't, you know, haven't thought that much of, who just sort of did kind of have this moment of, oh my God, you know.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 course, but you know, I think we could help at this point.

Speaker 3 Nothing, nothing.

Speaker 3 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 can say that, right?

Speaker 3 The business leaders can say, I wish they'd been a little more consistency in the way they've done this. Terror stuff.
But I'm not criticizing, I'm not complaining about anything else.

Speaker 3 God forbid, you know, they should say anything about the collapse of the rule of law here in the the United States of America.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 6 So trust in President Trump. He knows what he's doing.
This is a proven economic formula.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 5 Trust in Trump, trust in Trump. There's Crenshaw again.
Trust the President. You had a little meditation on that this morning.
What?

Speaker 3 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 and morning shots.

Speaker 3 Well, no, it just said, 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But now we're supposed to, in the era of Trump, it's just a nice, nice, it's a terrible encapsulation.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We're supposed to trust the guy. And we are really just one step from being ordered to love the guy and sort of

Speaker 3 pay and bow to him, which in fact, a lot of that is being asked, of course, of a lot of

Speaker 3 people, right? I mean, you know, it's cultish.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I mean, imagine,

Speaker 5 you know, 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.

Speaker 3 I wonder how that's going to really work out in practice.

Speaker 3 They all think, I talked to a couple of lawyers, as it happens at various things over the weekend.

Speaker 3 You know, they all kind of, I mean, they don't work for those firms, but they know people obviously who do. And their own firms may be facing these choices.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I don't think we've seen any of these agreements. Who's going to judge?

Speaker 3 Do we think Trump's just going to let the law firm show up and say, hey, did $8 million of pro bono work for you this last six months? You know, yeah, it's all fine. It's good stuff.

Speaker 3 Don't worry about it, Mr. President.
You know what? They'll tell this representative. We don't think the representative is going to say, I want to see who you were doing the work for.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 You know, these Holocaust, these Holocaust deniers were shut up. Some, you know, didn't get treated equally on some God knows, right, on some campus.
And we want you to be helping them.

Speaker 3 And I don't know.

Speaker 5 He floated the coal companies last week as a possible group that lawyers will have to do work for. So

Speaker 5 good luck with that and the greenwashing program

Speaker 5 at the law firm. All right, Bill.
Anything else? Did I miss anything?

Speaker 3 We should end on a 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 revelling on 10 issues, not just one.

Speaker 3 And I do think the Richie Torres statement shows the Democrat and others' statements like that show some of the Democrats are more in a fighting mood than they were.

Speaker 3 I think Sarah found that from those two focus groups she did this week, and they 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 the moderates, not so much.

Speaker 3 But in these focus groups, the moderates and the progressives were equally sort of aggressive and wanting their representatives to be aggressive against Trump.

Speaker 3 So maybe all of that is getting a little bit better, I think, than it was.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 The governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiros, was in arson in this home last night. Very serious.

Speaker 5 When I first saw it, I thought, until I saw the pictures, I guess, of the governor's mansion, I didn't realize, like, just, it was a very serious attack by somebody that, I guess, hopped the fence.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Is that right? This is your area.

Speaker 3 It was Sunday morning, so it was after the first Seder, and they had been some publicity around that Seder.

Speaker 3 Well, not publicity, but he put out a photo of his family and some friends at the Seder at dinner. So maybe that, you know, even more, provoked this guy even more, but he seems to hate Shapiro.
And

Speaker 3 yeah, maybe shouldn't be able to jump the fence to the governor's house and

Speaker 3 get inside at 2 a.m. or whatever.
I'm sure they'll look at security again. No, it's terrible.
And again,

Speaker 3 you can't blame it directly on Trump, I suppose, and all this. But the atmosphere of vigilante-violence that's out there, the failure of Trump, I guess, personally to say anything about it.

Speaker 3 Is that correct? As we speak, at least here, late morning on Monday. I believe that's true that he's not a governor of a major state, is

Speaker 3 subjected to a dangerous attack. And there's not the routine kind of expression of concern from the presidents.

Speaker 5 Trump mum 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.

Speaker 5 Bill Crystal, uplifting as always.

Speaker 3 Sorry about that. Next week.
Next week.

Speaker 5 No. No.

Speaker 5 People don't come here to be uplifted. Okay.

Speaker 5 There are other podcasts in the city.

Speaker 3 Four years from now. Four years from now.

Speaker 3 We'll have a cheerful podcast.

Speaker 5 Every once in a while.

Speaker 5 We'll do a Schotten Freuda podcast. Every once in a while.
All All right, everybody. I'll be back here tomorrow and look forward to seeing you all then.

Speaker 3 Peace.

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Speaker 3 for heart to

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Speaker 3 Feel the be under your feet, the floor's on fire.

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Speaker 3 casabra.

Speaker 3 I'm broken,

Speaker 3 bra, I'm on

Speaker 3 the

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Speaker 3 for the debra, a brakadabra.

Speaker 3 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.