S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity

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Hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Trouble inside the Trump administration.

Big trouble in the markets, trouble in the world. It's a bloodbath, in particular in the S&P, which is now at its worst three-day performance since 1987, as Trump refuses to back off his moronic tariff regime.
Here to discuss that and much more. It's Monday, so it's Bulwark Editor-at-Large, Bill Kristol.
Hey, Bill, what's up? Hanging in there, Tim. How are you? I was just talking to your pal Stan Boyger.
He's an economist over at AEI who's been one of the ones who's been stalwart in opposition to Trump's excesses, particularly on the economic side of things and his stupid trade wars. People can check out over on YouTube on the Bulwark Takes feed about his uh his paper about how stupid these tariffs are they're like they didn't even do their own math right and uh we were joking at the end that um you know the schadenfreude of watching all the terrible people be wrong and lose money is nice it's not exactly going to pay for kids' college fund or the retirement home.

You know, so it's mixed feelings.

It would be nice if Trump could discredit himself without ruining the country.

I mean, this is the kind of problem we have with having elected Trump.

A point you've been making, I believe, online and on various podcasts and on the Bulwark as well over the last several days.

All these people who were like, gee, this is really, how could this be happening?

I don't know. Why is this happening? It's so mysterious.

Maybe if you didn't elect Trump, it wouldn't be happening. I mean, Vorgia's thing is amazing

because, as he said, he's anti-tariff anyway. He's a free trader.
But if you're going to do it,

they seem to have done it in about the stupidest, most damaging possible way,

including the math errors and the kind of insanity of how they calculate this country

by country tariff. So it's really, it is like, let's have a bad policy and then execute it

I'm sorry. way, including the math errors and the kind of insanity of how they calculate this country by country tariffs.
So it's really, it is like, let's have a bad policy and then execute it horribly. You know, you hate to hand it to Elon Musk, but it's not just, it's not just the AEI.
It's not just us at the Bulwark, you know, it's just the Democrats. Even the shadow president is starting to have some concerns about the policy.
Are you ready to side with Elon Musk for a second here, Bill? He was subtweeting the president this morning.

Some issues on the home front with the shadow president subtweeting the president.

And he just posted the video of this classic free market fundamentalist text,

The Pencil.

And I want to get your former Republican muscles pumping this morning.

So I want to play a little bit from The Pencil. There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil.
Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it's made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington.
To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel.
To make the steel, it took iron ore.

This black center, we call it lead, but it's really graphite, compressed graphite.

I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America.

This red top up here, the eraser, bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya,

where the rubber tree isn't even native. It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government.

It was the magic of the price system,

the impersonal operation of prices

that brought them together and got them to cooperate

to make this pencil so that you could have it for a trifling sum.

Beautiful.

Milton Friedman, the simplicity. Are you feeling good? Are you feeling like a Straussian again, Bill? How does that make you feel? That was such a fundamentalist kind of free market thing.
Before Friedman, I think Friedman narrated it, but I think it was around in the 50s or 60s. There was some organization whose name was escaping me that sort of promoted really like popular education in free markets.

This was going to correct all the errors of the New Deal and of democratic socialism and stuff.

And they had pamphlets.

Hey, don't get our listeners mad about the pencil.

Well, there was interesting about free trade, incidentally.

Someone made this point in an article over the last few days, John Ganz, I think.

Free trade was an important part of the New Deal.

People forget that.

I mean, what's the most famous tariff in recent times? holly 1930 republican tariff what did roosevelt do he reduced tariffs in 1934 labor wasn't crazy about some of the free trade stuff so he didn't publicize it as much but it was very much part of the intellectual you know sort of organization so to speak of the new deal iglesias made this point too about how like actually it's weird it's flipped that the populists are pro tariffs now on both sides like back then it was like tariffs raised prices on working people and so a lot of them a lot of the intellectuals in that era were against it as you said and tariffs historically you know could be gamed by the big corporations the big businesses so whereas you can't do that if you're just a working guy and you have to go to the store and buy stuff and so forth so and and invest in, you know, modest amounts in the stock market. No, I know.
Anyway, the Friedman thing, it is. But it is a kind of nice, simple explanation of free trade.
I mean, that's why these tariffs are so particularly stupid. They seem to be premised.
Voyager might have explained this better. I'm sure explained this better than I would.
And the idea that our bilateral trade balance with every country should be zero, should be even. Right.
Not I mean, not that we trade, we import more stuff from this country, so we can export more to that country. And it's a giant thing.
And it evens out and benefits everyone over the long term. That's comparative advantage.
And everyone has their specialized international resources. So dumb.
I mean, it's so stupid. I mean, whatever the fancy arguments for some targeted terrorists on national security or other reasons, sheltering, you know, what is this called, baby industries, young industries and stuff.
I mean, this is so damaging. And the markets correctly see it, right? I was talking with another economist this weekend, not Stan in this case.
I said, are you surprised by the severity of the market reaction? What really accounts for that? And he said it is partly that the actual tariffs are going to damage the actual economy, prices, imports, and so forth. But it's also the incredible stupidity and recklessness and willfulness that Trump and his team have shown.
The market is pricing that in now, which as you and I have discussed, they were sort of just denying for the last three, five months since the election, right? It's not really going to happen. You kept dancing around it, moron, stupidity.
They said we can say the R word again, Bill. They said we can say it again.
And this is, I don't even know if it would be the R word, S. I think this is the subtarded economic policy that has put this collapse in place.
It has no rationale at all across any level. The funny thing is, Besant was on, all these things are darkly funny.
When I say funny, it's not really funny to see what's happening to our 401ks. But Besant was on, I think, NBC this weekend.
And he's like, you know, this is these finance guys underestimating Trump again. And I'm going, no, Scott, opposite.
This is a reflection of the fact that they overestimated him, right? That they were, that they did not recognize how reckless and stupid you guys were going to be. They didn't listen to, they've been listening to me and Bill.
They would have been pricing this stuff in between November and now, because we've been telling people this is going to come, you know, but it's this large shock and crash, essentially because investors refuse to believe that they could be this stupid. You know, I watched the clip of Besant.
Yeah, he's such a bad defender. I do feel like, I think I tweeted this, the Democrats should just stay off all TV for the next two weeks and let Besant and Kevin Hassett and Lutnick go on.
Because every time they go on, they make it worse for Trumpesson's super clever thing was, well, we should be glad the markets worked well. You know, like the actual computers were able to process the trades as the markets dropped 2,000 points.
That was great. Thank God for that.
And secondly, he had this fake argument that, well, the markets dropped on election night in 2016, which is true. I think they went down several hundred points.
They literally rebounded like in three days, if I'm not mistaken, right? And the markets priced incorrectly that Trump, I mean, whatever you think of Trump, obviously, but that he was going to be kind of a pro-business president. And most of them priced in the fact that we were at a strong recovery finally after the Great Recession, and it was going to continue, and Trump didn't mess it up, actually, because his tariffs were very limited in the first term.
This is such a good case study, too, in what we've been arguing for quite a while. The second term isn't the first term, right? The first term was some stupidity, some Trumpiness, some willfulness, but hemmed in by the guardrails.
Not here reinforced by all these guys. And essentially, can I say that one friend of mine, acquaintance of mine on Wall Street, was reassuring me that Scott Bessence is going to be fine.
He's going to be the adult in the room, you know, and it's really important that he got the Treasury Secretary job. And how's that working out? Yeah, that person might not have looked that closely at Scott Besson's returns, because one of our super listeners was texting me a chart of how much money Scott Besson had in his hedge fund over the years.
And the chart kind of looks similar to the S&P 500 right now, actually. I wanted to just zero in on the Commerce Secretary, Howard Nutlick, for a second, because he was not exactly knocking it out of the park over the weekend as well.
I want to play a clip for you of possibly one of the worst talking points I've ever heard on a Sunday show. Let's listen.
Remember, the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little

screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones. That kind of thing is going to come to America.
Just what everybody wants. The screw in the screws.
We'll just have all the engineers overseeing the screw screwing. It's going to be automated, of course, once it comes back here.
But what is that then? I thought all these manufacturing businesses are supposed to produce jobs. So he's giving away the truth, which is automation is what's killed the jobs, not free trade.
But anyway, yeah, he's terrible. I mean, he really is awful.
Some other defender of Trump, that Bill Ackman guy in New York, attacks. This was good when they all started fighting each other.
Well, the reason Lutnick is defending the tariffs is that his firm is a bond firm, Cantor, I think, in New York. And he's long bonds.
And if you're long bonds, you don't mind a little economic slowdown because bonds do fine as opposed to stocks, as I understand it. And therefore, he's like's his book he's he's he's defending his self-interest so to get these these what these billionaires sniping at each other and claiming they're just doing this for the sake of their own their own book that's a good that's a good development i think again it's too bad we have to suffer for it it would be entertaining to watch all this you know and the penguins the penguins are been excellent memes i've got to say do you not agree with that this really uh the penguin memes have been good the ackman thing is also just like his ackman supported trump people don't know this guy he's a he's a clown but a rich clown who made money shorting the market during covet actually so he knows a little bit about this and he has to come up with this convoluted theory for why these people that he put into the white House are ruining everything.
I just want to be like, Bill, Bill, you supported the stupidest person in America who bankrupted everything he ever did before he created a TV show that made him seem like a good businessman. Like that's what happened here.
There's no 40 chess. They're not trying to lower interest rates for a long, you know, Mar-a-Lago accord and Lutnick isn't secretly helping his bonds like he's just a suck up he's just a clown who wants attention sucking up to the idiots that we made president so that hopefully that clears things up for uh for uh ackman i want to play for you my father sent me a little comedy bit i think dark comedy he's trying to process how things with the mutual funds are going as much as me i I think that, uh, Dave Chappelle went pretty anti woke and was, was celebrated on the right for his kind of anti trans comedy.
It seems like he's also had a turn already in the first, whatever it's been 10, 11 weeks of this administration. And I think his little comedy routine from last week, it does a nice job of rebutting Howard Lutnick's Screws Theory.

So let's listen to Chappelle.

So iPhones can be $9,000?

Leave that job in China where it belongs.

None of us want to work that hard.

What the fuck is he thinking?

I want to wear Nikes. I don't want to make them shits.
What the fuck is he thinking? I want to wear Nikes.

I don't want to make them shits.

What the fuck are you doing?

Stop trying to give us Chinese jobs.

That's a good line.

I want to wear Nikes.

I don't want to make them.

I mean, it's a deep kind of understanding of free markets and comparative advantage.

He should go to AEI, Chappelle. That was good.
He should. And then Voyager could do a co-bill.
I don't know. My life is so crazy right now.
I was out somewhere and I can't remember where it was. And a nice woman came up to me and she was like, I just want to hear the latest with the cat.
Just want to hear the latest with the neighborhood cat. So I'm glad people are out there following the saga.
It was nice to share. The neighborhood cat, Aretha, a boy named Aretha, was actually in the house this morning.
He's now our cat. Took to the vet, did all the things y'all told me to do.
I still like to spend a lot of time outside. But was inside today because we had a very minor cold front in New Orleans.
It got down to 55. And the kitty

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It's pretty noteworthy that we have Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle already pretty harshly coming out against the administration across across different items. It was Rogan I played last week on the Venezuelan deportations and now Chappelle on this.
I guess it's just worth sitting for a second on the fact that like, it was only a month ago that everybody was like, there's been a real vibe shift. You know, people are coming around to Trump, you know, that's changing the way it's changing people's behavior.
Who knows what positive results could come if you're a conservative, right? And I do wonder if there's some ripple effects on stiffening the spines of people in big law. Lauren Egan has a great newsletter this weekend for the Bulwark on how Democrats are pissed at that, at Democrats who are executives of these law firms that are folding in corporate America.
Like, are these guys going to start to be like, okay, wait a minute. This whole, this little moment here where we all were like, oh, we need to suck up to Trump and then everything will be okay.
Maybe we might be sensing that that dark period in our history is already passed. I don't know.
Is that too hopeful? A little bit, yeah. I mean, I think the darkest period has passed or is passing.
The question is, and you've remarked on this also over the weekend and late last week, these nice Republican congressmen and senators who were so upset about this, maybe they could actually do something about it. So we're at the being concerned stage.
Same with the donors, same with the Wall Street guys, same with everyone. So those people could have a lot of effect, the donors obviously within the administration to some degree, but also on members of Congress.
So they should be pushing members of Congress to stop this. This is a little congressional grant of power, the emergency powers that Trump is using.
It can be overturned, as I understand it, by 51 votes in the Senate and 218 in the House. And I don't know that it's even vetoed, could be vetoed if they pass that resolution, withdrawing that grant of power.
Is that true? I think so. Yeah, it's the veto part that I'm not sure about.
I think it was Jake Sherman who said this. And again, we're in unprecedented times.
So, you know, Jake is very good. He's over at Punchbowl of analyzing the Hill.
His point was that Trump could veto it. Could you imagine getting whatever you'd need, however many Republicans you'd need to get to 67 in the Senate? Democrats need to hammer home, I think.
They're not doing quite enough of this, in my opinion. The fact that four Republican members of Congress could stop this, or at least reverse it for now and let Trump then veto it, and let's have an override vote and put everyone on the record.
I mean, I was on a conference call recently, some Democrats explaining why they really couldn't do much. Maybe they should get a little out of the why we can't do anything as a minority mindset and a little more into the let's try to do everything and then make the Republicans explain why they're, the Trumpy Republicans explain why they're stopping it and the wishy-washy Republicans explaining why they're not actually just joining the Democrats to change these disastrous policies.
What do you think? I mean, you've been pushing this for a while. Another few days of the markets like this and one or two other events that might not be good for Trump.
And I don't know, you could have real 2005 level Republican, you know, frantic panic, I should think, as he did over Iraq and Katrina in 2005rina in 2005 no i don't know yeah i was going to point to a little later than that which would have been late 2008 during that financial crisis right i mean the bank bailout at first remember was not like there was not a sense that it was going to pass on the hill right they got defeated in the house the house the first time. Yeah.
I got defeated in the house. And I, and I remember kind of just watching that as an observer at that point, I was not, I guess I was out of politics.
So it was after McCain loss. Oh, that was back in my first job for Sarah Longwell.
Actually, I was working in an office right next door to Sarah Longwell back when we were in our PR days and our youth. Anyway, I remember watching that and it fails.
Right. And the markets just tank again.
And eventually it's kind of essentially this outside pressure that forces the issue on the hill. That's certainly very possible here.
And if we're at the worst three-day drop since 1987 in the S&P 500, how much lower could it go to force that? So there's already some chatter with regards to Don Bacon bacon who is the republican representing the omaha swingy kind of omaha district in nebraska he has a resolution to take this power back if you make it a privilege but john mike johnson isn't going to bring it up if you if you bring a privilege resolution then there's a way to force the vote so he's been he was asked about that over the weekend and kind of basically said well you know maybe there'll be a time for that i like didn't say no didn't say it's yeah yes he was wishy-washy as usual so maybe there is something there you know but again like this stuff gets very complicated right like then you have to get it to the senate and you have thune and johnson both you know there's enough republican senators that would go along with that but would they go along with it in a hostile you know environment where Mike Johnson was overruled then you get real chaos in the Republican order the idea that I've put forth which is a Bill Crystal pleaser which is fantasy world idea but like again I don't understand why it should be fantasy world is that Brian Fitzpatrick maybe maybe a couple of the New York Republicans, Lawler, somebody like that, who knows, somebody that's retiring. They could just leave the Republican conference and work with the Democrats on a new speaker.
And they could get a compromised speaker put forth that could then really take the power of the purse back from Trump if he's going to be so reckless that he tanks the economy. And we're obviously not there yet.
But I think it's worth just like putting that on the table and like reminding people that that's possible. Right.
Because that, to your point, Bill, is like a Democratic job that I think could help nudge things along. you know if there were democrats out there that were saying yeah if they want to stop these tariffs i would work with don bacon on finding a compromise solution you know that you know wouldn't obviously give the democrats everything they want but would you know get the a fucking you know trump sycophant out of the speaker's office anyway we're in crazy times it's not like realistic but i don't think it's unimaginable that you get to a point where that happens if the mad king won't do anything right i mean mike turner who is the house intelligence committee chairman of republican from dayton deposed by trump's orders i don't know if he's going to run again or not he could be a speaker i guess i guess I don't say acting speaker, but I guess he'd have to be the real speaker.
For three months, six months, you can almost explicitly say this is for the rest of this fiscal year or something. Get aid for Ukraine, which he cares a lot about.
Get rid of the tariffs, maybe one or two other things. Just fix the most egregious things Trump has done.
Obviously, tell everyone, on most issues, you vote however you wish. And if the Democrats want to to pass stuff they can pass stuff you know yeah i wonder how it's it doesn't happen it again well that's because it never happened but it's rarely happened in american history but people do change parties in american history and occasionally at the state level right you've had these kind of compromise yeah situations in state legislatures so anyway yeah i agree it's worth it's worth getting out there because the democrats need to think a little more imaginatively about this moment too they can't simply sit around saying we're in the minority by four votes so we just can't do anything you know and i think those people who turned out on saturday to demonstrate they want to see a little more activity on the democrats part yeah shout out to the people who turned out at the hands-off protests on saturday but yeah i mean there's two ways to look at this right it's like well do you want to stop the bad stuff from happening or do you want to help your you know like because i i think if things don't get any better the democrats literally could do nothing the james carville thing is true like they could probably play dead and win the house back and who knows how depending on how bad it gets maybe even the senate back in two years but it's like okay well how much damage is going to be done before then? And so I do think if you want to stop it, and if you want to signal to people that you are fighting for something and rally people to, there are opportunities, I think, to do this sort of thing.
And that the congressional Republicans are part of the problem, not just Trump, because Trump himself isn't on the ballot in 26. I think it's kind of cost-free to try to do the stuff.
If they stop you, then you say, well, they stopped us from trying to do the stuff. It's like the Democrats trying to cut off funding for Iraq.
They didn't do it. They knew they were going to succeed with Bush as president.
But it got them, from their point of view, the right side of that issue. One more thing, just on the party switching, because I know people are rolling their eyes at bill and tim talking about this but like people have switched parties a decent amount in my life i mean to me it's actually one of the most insane things about the trump era that it hasn't happened like from republican to democrat and you've seen liz and adam blow up their careers over it and jeff flake i guess quasi you know ends up being appointed to a democratic administration but like staying in congress and switching parties jeff andrew did this the other way turning the trump era which is crazy trump has picked up a plus one on a person switching parties and no one has gone the other way and when i was growing up in den in colorado ben nighthorse campbell switch parties

jim jeffords switch parties vermont arlen specter switch parties so i and those are just off the top

of my head i wasn't planning on this rant right now so i'm sure that there were others like i

don't know at a time of extreme emergency which maybe we're not quite at but we're on the cusp of

might be worth at least stirring the pot with that a little bit, raising it as a possibility. Y'all, could there be a time with more uncertainty in the world than right now? I don't know why I sound like Chandler Bing and friends, but that's just how it came out.
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Go less at selectquote.com slash bulwark go to selectquote.com slash bulwark today to get started that's selectquote.com slash bulwark one more tariff thing because this relates to you know the other crisis it's a major crisis if you're living in kiev right now and a crisis for europe that has now been subordinated to our more acute crises here in America, which is what's happening in Ukraine. Kevin Hassett, your buddy, longtime Republican economist in good standing, was on, asked to defend these tariffs that obviously he was against his entire career until two minutes ago when he decided he's a big tariff fan.
And he's an administration chairman of the National Economic Council. And he was asked why Russia was not put on the tariff list by George Stephanopoulos.
And I thought his response was pretty interesting. I want to play it.
Why did the president not include Russia on the list of countries who are facing tariffs? There's obviously an ongoing negotiation with Russia and Ukraine, and I think the president made the decision not to conflate the two issues. It doesn't mean that Russia, the fullest of time, is going to be treated wildly different than every other country.
But Russia is one of the only countries, one of the few countries that is not subject to these news tariffs, aren't they? They're in the middle of a negotiation, George, aren't they? Well, I'm asking a different question.

And I just want to know why Russia is not in the middle.

Would you literally advise that you go in and put a whole bunch of new things on the table in the middle of a negotiation that affects so many American and Ukrainian and Russian lives?

We're tariffing Ukraine.

Ukraine's on the list.

Ukraine got a 10% tariff.

Are they not part of the negotiations?

I really don't think so.

It's just another accidental reveal here that they don't want to make Putin mad. They're scared of Putin.
They're either scared of him slash they kind of are sympathetic with him in the negotiations. And whereas Ukraine, we can just bully around and whatever.
And so Ukraine gets a 10% tariff, Russia zero. Great job, Kevin Hassett.
You and I have been around a bit and seen people go on Sunday shows and defend policies they weren't really in favor of internally and do their best defending bad policies, honestly, and ones that weren't working well. I've never I mean, it's pathetic, those three this weekend.
They were all on Sunday, I think, right, Bissett? But Bessent, Hassett, and Lutnick. And what a crew.
Yeah, it was across the network. abc nbc i don't know what they got out of it um i guess trump you know gets to see them humiliate themselves to stay in his good graces i guess jd vance isn't he normally eager to get on these sunday shows where was he where was he this weekend a couple people have been noting this our poster vice president who tweets almost as much as me and Bill.

Not a ton of posting here. Some retweets, a couple retweets.
He's retweeting Walter Kern for some reason. But last actual tweet from him, April 2, it looks like.
So it does seem like there is some tension on the inside i mean the elon musk thing is not nothing like he's sub tweeting with the milton friedman video and then also he's going at it with navarro and he tweeted about how navarro thinks he's smart because he went to harvard or something like made fun of him as like a you know being a harvard educated economist actually is a negative not a positive so i don't exactly know what to make of all of that but like there was a moment where i think some in the media were trying to manufacture like this dissent between musk and and and there really was like a musk bannon feud but bannon's not in the white house like this is the first time where it really feels like inside things are dicey. And it has a little effect outside too, because if Musk is now legitimizing his buddies, his supporters to kind of go down this path, right? Musk having done this will lead to more people on the outside being willing to be critical of Trump.
If Trump and Musk and everyone were a united front, the people who like Musk, it's amazing anyone does, but at least his fellow Silicon Valley bros and all these characters would be hesitant to be criticizing perhaps the policy. So you asked me earlier, can I praise Musk? I really can't praise Musk.
I just can't do it. But I'm glad.
I'm glad he is saying what he thinks about these tariffs, I guess. That sound? It's lucky cutting prices on over 4,000 items across our stores.
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I want to go to 60 minutes.

Another thing I did a full video on last night

because I was just so mad and sad about the whole thing.

I just kind of wanted to get off my feelings immediately.

The 60-minute segment doesn't really tell us anything that we don't know, but it just provided a lot of additional details to the stuff that we did already know about the horrible treatment of the Venezuelans. Just a couple of quick things.
They looked at all the names of the people who were on the list. We think that is a verified list verified list we are not 100 sure because the administration has declared state secrets so so they get to keep it as a secret who they disappeared to this concentration camp and based on that list they said they 75 percent of the people had no criminal record at all i think it was like 22 percent of the people did have a criminal record but some percentage of that it was like shoplifting or whatever there was also some percentage of that where there were serious crimes and then three percent they couldn't they couldn't verify the names so like the number of people that could be totally wrongly sent there based on their tattoos might even be greater than we thought like we don't we don't know they went deeper in the story of Andri, which we've talked about a lot on this podcast.
He's a gay stylist, makeup artist. They found additional pictures of him from that Time magazine photographer who happened to be in El Salvador taking photos when the guys came off the plane.
They showed these horrible new pictures of him being stripped naked and treated rough. There's more details was provided by his lawyer at Immigrant Defenders, if you want to support that group.
They're doing great work. Just about his background, 60 Minutes looked back at Trisha McLaughlin, the spokesperson for DHS, had said that it wasn't just the tattoos in this case.
She had posted a tweet saying that his social media post indicated sympathy to Trenda Aragua. 60 Minutes looked at 10 years of his social media accounts and didn't find anything.
They found mostly pictures of him doing makeup and looking very gay. And it's not as if there was a situation where he could have like deleted old stuff because it was a surprise.
He wasn't expected to be disappeared to El salvador that day they told two other stories of other people that i haven't talked about on this podcast their situation seemed very similar frankly so the whole thing is just unimaginable like how bad it is it's enraging we'll get to the democrats in a second but like unlike the tariffs the republicans are just okay with this and the administration there's nothing they're unapologetically going out there just smearing these people they've kidnapped these people and sent them to a torture dungeon that they also show a lot of video from this this prison it's just just horrifying and there's nothing there's nothing nothing. There's no pushback at all.
Civil liberties types, Rand Paul, nothing. No, it's all horrifying.
And the Republicans on the Hill have been pretty bad too. Certainly within the administration, there's been just contempt.
So the federal judge in this case, there are several cases, but Judge Bosberg in one of these cases has been very careful and cautious, I would even say, in what he can, can't order. Is there justification? Can he review what the administration has done? He's really tiptoed up to the line of saying, I mean, he has said, you guys have to try to get this guy back.
They're not saying, well, okay, or okay, but not trying that hard. That might be what a normal administration would do, but to go through the motions, they're just showing contempt for him.
I mean, that'll be little contempt in court. That might be the case too.
But just, you know, making contemptuous statements about, oh, good, you go get him back from El Salvador. You have jurisdiction over the president of El Salvador.
Well, just to your point on this on the judges real quick, that today, the deadline is tonight. The judge has issued an order for not Andre.
This is the Maryland ad. And this is the case where the DOJ admitted false, that they wrongly sent him there.
They admitted that they didn't intend to, but they still aren't going to do anything about it because they say he's a member of a gang, so whatever. But they admitted that he was here.
He had a no deportation order. The judge said, you have to bring him back by Monday night.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that they're going to do that tonight so they're just going to fully divide we'll go through the form of requesting that he got back indeed pam bondi fired the or put on leave or something administrative leave the career attorney at justice who had argued this case friday who i happen to be talking with someone new aaron reichlandMelnick, who's our friend who's been on a couple of bulwark things, who knows everything about immigration law and policy. This guy has been arguing for administrations in a tough way, in a way that immigrant rights advocates regard as effective, but very much on the other side, for 15 years.
This is not some liberal law. This guy is sort of, and has been defending.
He was put in this job because he was one of the career people they thought was tougher on immigration from a sort of policy point of view. And he said, but he can't defend this.
And he said, I can't understand what's happened here. We can't defend having made an error.
I think he asked the judge for 24 hours to try to figure out what was happening and so forth. Bondi has put him on administrative leave.
So the administration's all doubled down, as you say, on this really horrendous thing they've done. They also seem to be doubling down on other crackdowns internally on immigrants who have in no way fallen into the category of violent criminals or even criminals and, in fact, fall into the category often of, so far as one can tell, law-abiding citizens who have American relatives who are undocumented in many cases, but are living the kinds of lives we would want immigrants to live.
The Republicans on the Hill, I haven't really seen much one way or the other. They seem to be, you think, are they rah-rah or are they just keeping their head down? I mean, rah-rah or nothing.
I mean, there's definitely some of them that are rah-rah tweeting about how, oh, these Democrats the gang members. They're trying to make this into an issue.
It's like we're focusing on the El Salvador thing because it is just, again, unprecedented and unimaginable that we disappear people to this. And people should watch the 60 Minutes thing because it's just so shocking.
As you mentioned, there are other stories popping up of people that are being detained. There's the 73-year-old grandfather in Lafayette here in Louisiana.
There's a Cuban refugee here for 45 years. You mentioned we're offline the bakery near the border in Texas where they were law abiding citizens, but they'd hired some undocumented workers to work at the bakery.
There's some third graders up in New York, I guess, that have been detained. Their principal put out a statement recently.
We included that in the morning shots this morning. So what they're doing is just, it is not like rounding up the worst criminals.
Like to me, it seems like they don't have the numbers that they wanted. And so now they're going about and doing anything to grab any other people to get like the deportation or detention numbers up and to, and to scare people really on the scaring part.
going to work like i don't know about you i was talking to people this weekend i know who are who are maybe citizens now here but are from another country talking about friends and family they have it's just like why would somebody come here if they are on a visa or on a green card from another country you know if if the risk to be, you might be sent to Natchez in Louisiana or El Salvador. We're stashed at the airport for nothing or for unbelievably trivial failure to fill out some form correctly.
You've been here a zillion times. You're a research scientist.
You're a professor, a teacher, a tourist, whatever. Did you see that chart? I saw this that international travel into the united states by americans over the last three four months is pretty stable i guess or whatever it normally goes up and down a little bit more and you know spring break week or something but i mean basically it's not by foreign nationals is now down something like 12 yeah and the canadians it's down like 40 yeah and then this chart was done by someone who's anti-tariff, so it shows you the tariff dates.
But I think, as someone on Twitter pointed out or Blue Sky pointed out, I think it's probably more the immigration stuff that's actually right now leading people not to come here. The tariffs thing is not affecting them quite.
So, yeah, the cruelty is the point and all that. And now there are, I guess, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who are losing their temporary protected status today i think uh now they're not going to deport 350 000 people at once but suddenly they're all undocumented they could be picked up uh walking down the street or picking up their kids at school i mean it's all grotesque and what what problem are we addressing the border is closed okay i mean i'm whatever one thinks about how severe one should have been at the border it is literally closed no one can get over it no one is getting asylum if they do get over even if they honestly should be given the least consideration for asylum but they're just turning everyone away the country is shut down in that respect what are they going after people who are living here peacefully for what's the crisis what's the emergency what's the policy goal even to scare people yeah so people don't come and that's what it is and and it will work and to try to get them to self-deport so that we have a wider so that we have what a wider country with with fewer of these people with mexican names i guess for latino hispanic names i don't know yeah yeah the white replacement theory i mean there's tom holman advanced it he's like the immigration czar now but no i look pam bondy was on this weekend and she said if you're a venezuelan gang member you should self-deport but if you see what they're doing that's kind of like saying if you're venezuelan you should self-deport right because it's like i don't know are you gonna call me are you gonna accuse me a gang member because i have a fucking tattoo with a crown on it that says mom like i don't know you know are they you know look in my phone and see that i posted some meme that seems sympathetic to a foreign group like and then i might get sent to el salvador you know so they're intentionally trying to scare people and they and it's gonna work they should be scared it's fucking horrible which takes me briefly again the Democrats.
I was talking to some of the immigration attorneys and I was like, what is your ask for that? You know, because I was like, maybe I'm missing something, right? Like maybe there's a behind the scenes thing that they can be doing that's useful. There's nothing.
And their ask is draw attention to this. We got like, we can't, there's a lot happening out there.
You know, this could go away. Like these people in the 60 minutes piece to Philip Holip holsinger said it seemed like they were ghosts like the people that were being disappeared into this the depths of this prison and you can become a ghost actually if there's only random people that are immigration advocates talking about this and so they're like our ask when we're meeting with democrats is to talk about this and i was like well is that has that happened? And they were like, not really.
There are a couple of examples, but I don't get it. And we talked about this a little bit on the next level.
I think that there is a combination of a fear about the past election, that immigration is a losing issue, and we just don't want to talk about it. It's better to talk about the economy.
That's part of it. I think that there's a fear that they're going to come out and defend this makeup artist and it's going to turn out he was really smuggling fentanyl in his makeup kit or whatever i got you know and they don't know they don't want to put their names on the line but this is too bad of a situation for that fear pressure has to be brought to bear on this and i know jd vD.
Vance wants this fight, but I just, I reject this notion of like, oh, you shouldn't play into their hands. Like these are humans that we, what we're doing is unconscionable and attention needs to be drawn to it.
And I just refuse to believe, you know, maybe if you're a frontline Democrat in Arizona, this isn't the thing to talk about. But there are a lot of other Democrats for whom they're politically protected for this.
And frankly, a lot of Democrats who might get political value out of being seen as a fighter on this. Totally.
It's such a good case study, I think, of fighting the last war and misunderstanding what the last war was, you know, and what the battles of that war. So yes, you shouldn't have been, it was probably politically costly to defend Biden's border policy in early 2024, before he fixed it, actually.
This is different. This is like, I was on another call with some Democrats and one of the people, kind of a co-labor type, what you'd expect.
Well, we shouldn't just be against tariffs. Some tariffs are good.
The free trade regime has had problems. And actually, in this case, a couple of sensible Democrats said, we don't have to even get into this.
I mean, you don't need to articulate your careful tariff policy as opposed to their stupid just say he is ruining the u.s economy with these tariffs they are crazy they are stupid they look at the markets look at everything we're going to have a recession because of donald trump and the republicans who won't stand up to him period it's the same here the fact that people might have not wanted you to defend biden's border policy a year ago doesn't mean that you can't criticize this grotesque stuff that's happening here. And you just have to say, this is Trump being crazy.
And do you want your neighbors being deported? And on this other call, I think it's this call, so probably off the record, I shouldn't be saying all this, but it doesn't matter since they're just generic Zoom calls. I mean, not generic, they're just Zoom calls that no one will know who is on, it doesn't really matter.
Anyway, someone said, you know, they're so good at this, the Republicans. They're so clever.
That Haitian immigrant thing, they said. And I actually interrupted what you're not supposed to do and said, we don't have zero evidence the Haitian immigrant issue helped the Republicans.
I looked two seconds at the polls. There's no evidence that in the week it was a big issue, Republican numbers went up or anything like that.
And actually some pollster intervened. I was good of him and said, yeah, in fact, there's some evidence that they overplayed that issue.
They backed off it. They got back to the border.
You know, anyway, all I'm saying is that there's kind of such a simple minded. We can't discuss, say, the word immigration.
We can't speak up for any people from any country in Central America or Latin America, I guess. I think it's both it's both wrong.
It's just wrong. A.
B. Even if people don't agree with you entirely on it, they respect you for standing up for your principles.
People forget that part of politics too, where people are capable of saying, I'm not sure I agree with that person, but you know what? I'm impressed that he said what he thought. And no one likes a cowering political party or members of a party that are scared to say what they think, or they don't know what to think because they haven't gotten current, updated polling.
And as I say, furthermore, it's not the same. Just as Trump's tariffs are not like being for some complicated Biden tariff in 2022 that was going to help a little bit of Buy American stuff.
So being Trump's anti-immigrant policy is nothing like, you know, tightening up on the border when it was getting a little out of hand. It's anti-immigration and anti-immigrant.
It needs to be called out for what it is. It's not an attempt to toughen up on the border or restore a little bit of law and order.
It's a hatred of immigrants instead of immigration. All right.
Sound like Bill Kristol, people. You think you might want to run in 2028 and you have some passionate feelings about the fact that we are disappearing people to a torture dungeon in El Salvador with no due process? I'll put you at the front of the line.
You're welcome on the pod anytime. I think it's probably something that will get you some attention.
I think that my friends in California would probably have you on their show, Chris Hayes, other people that are fucking mad about this too. So, might be a way to get you some attention all right there's a north carolina state supreme court race allison riggs won by 700-ish votes over jefferson griffin the republican there was this three-judge panel this weekend in north carolina that ruled in favor of a recount on 65 000 votes they've got a what they call cure them to make sure that the people that made the votes are real people.
The judge said they have 15 days to find these people. It's mostly expats.
I think you can see what the strategy is here. I can imagine the expat vote would be more sympathetic to the Democrats.
Even conservative lawyers, I think the former state party lawyer has spoken out on this, the Republican state party lawyer in the state like this is crazy like they're really trying just to steal the supreme court seat in north carolina and do it through the judicial process the supreme court north carolina is five two so it might like it raised to that so it's something we're monitoring you know we'll see how it all shakes out but it is pretty despicable what the republicans are doing here and i think a sign of obviously what they would have done if Trump had lost in 2024 and what might be to come again. I don't think we're over the stop to steal stuff just because Trump won this time.
I think that's one of the, I mean, obviously what's happening is important in its own right. And the lawyers I know and trust who are not that partisan think this is way beyond the normal jousting that happens for a few weeks after an election or even a legitimate question or two.
This is April, and they're going after particular ballots that they think would be more democratic. But I think it is an arbinger of what will happen in states where Republicans have control of the state legislature, conceivably in 2026, certainly almost, certainly, but more likely even in 2028.
I mean, it is not a good sign that they have, after all this, they win the presidency, they win the both houses of Congress, and they want to steal elections. I mean, we also saw this in Wisconsin, incidentally, because we haven't done this since Wisconsin, where really lunatic theories about how that race was rigged, though a 10-point victory for the Democratic-backed candidate, obviously, started in the very far fringes of the internet.
I discussed this with Tom Josselin a little on my podcast yesterday, the Bullwork Sunday podcast. It started the way out fringes and has now migrated fairly close into Trump world.
I mean, it's now a semi-legitimate position to claim that there was, and Elon Musk, I think, retweeted a couple of people saying this. It's a semi-legitimate position in Republican and Trump circles to say that maybe there was something fishy in Wisconsin.
And there wasn't anything, and that probably goes nowhere. But again, it all helps corrupt, you know, lay the predicate for the further challenges, right? You also wrote this morning in the newsletter that I would point people to, which is very briefly kind of about the hubris of Trump and what we're saying.
And there's one little item in that news that I wanted to chew over with you really quick. According to a DC source of knowledge of the plan that's still being developed, Trump has commandeered Saturday, June 14th, the 250th anniversary of the U S army.
And as it happens, Trump's 79th birthday for a military parade would stretch almost four miles from pentagon and arlington to the white house according to the stores i mean that's ominous i guess totally i mean he tried to do this in 2018 they got stopped the defense department didn't want to do it the army didn't want to do it the dc government didn't want to do it maybe republican members of congress were like what are we doing we? We don't have military parades here all the time in the U.S. just because you're a president.
I mean, there was no commemorating some victory or something in a war. And now the Army was going to do some normal celebrations of his 250th birthday on bases and in communities and cemeteries and that kind of thing.
And now Trump's turning it into this, wants to turn it. And we'll see happens into this giant military parade, four miles from Arlington up to the White House, I suppose.
It happens, quote, happens to be his birthday. Andrew Edgar and I both read about this in Warning Shots.
Andrew had a very good lead item on Trump's hubris, the Trump administration's hubris in a whole bunch of areas. Maybe this will be the culmination of the hubris.
Maybe this is the breaking point. Maybe people look at this and think, this is not America.
And this is Trump just using troops, using people serving in the military as props for him. If it happens, it also happens to be the 85th anniversary of the Germans entering Paris.
You know, those famous videos of Germans marching into Paris, very depressing day. It happens to be the 85th anniversary of that.
Maybe that's somehow apt. Maybe not, though.
Maybe that won't be the culmination of the hubris. Maybe things will get darker than that.
And that's where I want to end. JBL wrote about the end of the American age last week.
That really kind of settled into my gut, because it's kind of in where my mind is going. On podcast a month or two ago and applebaum mentioned the book the captive mind so polish poet i'm not going to try to pronounce his first name his last name is milos i don't know if it was poets or once it won some literary award in the mid 20th century and it just kind of talks about you know how the how the authoritarian mindset took over.
And this combination of that kind of history I've been mulling over and just kind of watching what is happening in Europe and Canada and Australia as people already start to adjust themselves around us. I don't know.
And I think that there's a decent chance that like we're in the middle of something that people haven't really wrapped their heads around yet that many people haven't, which is that like, we're not gonna be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again here, like that there is something that has fundamentally changed about our role in the world. It's kind of a heavy topic for the very end of the podcast, but you I'm'm sure, read JVL's newsletter.
I wanted to get your two cents on it.

I devoted my own little newsletter Friday morning entirely to quoting from and praising

JVL's newsletter and elaborating on it a bit.

I've been very struck by this since February, since the Vance speech in Munich, the Hexas

speech, the degree to which Europeans saw, whoa, this is really not just the normal

zig and zag of policy.

It's not even the normal Trumpy kind of pseudo, you know, a bit of a break from previous policy that we're going to have to manage more carefully. It really could be the end of 80 years.
And I think the one-two punch of Putin and Ukraine, the threats to NATO, Vance's opinions about Europe fully expressed in that signal chat, then Trump's what he's been willing to just

stick it to all of our European allies and then the trade war which is as much against Europe as against anyone else I mean the combination of all that I had dinner as pure chance by with a central European businessman small group last week here in DC and he's pro-American totally pro-American there's businesses that do stuff in America and so forth when it's as a kind of about the think tank that's kind of pro-Atlantic, pro-American.

And he says it's it's fundamentally changed now jvl says it couldn't be put back together again i i resist that because i want to resist it i suppose and so i don't know you know these things can be pretty bad and still be reversed somewhat But this is a problem with he's president, Trump's president.

I mean, if we had a parliamentary system, I think it could be sort of reversed.

I've noticed in the tariffs, there's been a little talk about Liz Truss that I think she was the last.

She didn't last as long as it had to let us.

Right. And she was like a terrible, you know, total disaster.

It kind of put the exclamation point on the utter failure of the British conservative government since Brexit, including Brexit, I guess, and then led the way to the Labour victory finally over her successor. But that's a parliamentary system.
And we have no mechanism to remove Trump. And whereas in the first term, if one had removed him, one would have gotten Mike Pence, which you and I would have some problems with, but would have been acceptable.
Now we get Vance, which really is worse, I suppose, I don't know as bad. So this is where I think JBL could well be right.
And where the Europeans who are thinking this through in a pretty sober way are kind of, it's not, as I say, it's not like we could all suddenly three months from now, the policies are failing, new government, you know, old Republican, Don Bacon's president of the United States or something, or, you know, some kind of some coalition government comes in so four years of trump and vance with and even if they lose that no guarantee that this doesn't come back yet again i i think the odds are unfortunately decent that this is a real eight end of an 80 year period not a big zig in a succession of zigs and zags Well, that's where I'm at too. Just like your intersocial Democrats been popping out like mine are like the parliamentary system, man, I'm ready to junk our constitution, my little pocket constitution.
I put into one of those little, you know, library boxes in the neighborhood. It's like, okay, I'm, I'm, I want to talk to me about the constitution we gave the Germansans no i've had that thought too and it's not a foolish thought of course but i just want to come back to one thing that you stress so well really honestly over the last not just the last we've discussed it for several years honestly the first term we stressed it but now really really we do have a strong legislature we don't have a french style president who can just ignore the congress on foreign policy and on all these issues a to ukraine nato to i mean we have a strong legislature.
We don't have a French-style president who can just ignore the Congress on foreign policy. And on all these issues, A to Ukraine, NATO to, I mean, we have a strong president, so it's a little harder if you just have the legislature.
But four Republican senators, four Republican members of Congress could really slow down the damage, could really conceivably have the predicate for reversing some of it, could tell foreign nations that, hey, there really is a majority in this country against Trump. It's unfortunate he's president.
We're going to have to work this through for the next three and a half years. It could make a big difference.
And the fact that they're, I come back always to this. I'm just so infuriated at the Republicans on the Hill who know better privately.
I run into journalists all the time. Privately, they're very upset, very upset, really.
They're just really in a state about this. I've heard they've had a strong conversation with Howard Lutnick.
I mean, these are elected members of Congress, you know, and they're totally failing in their responsibility. Brian Fitzpatrick, do your job.
Do your job, sir. I agree with that, Bill.
Thank you so much. It's just a really uplifting Monday podcast as usual.
Sorry.

More good stuff to come.

That's why I tried to get Dave Chappelle in there.

I'm trying to give you guys some gifts.

Just little presents for me.

I don't play Trump's voice almost ever.

I'm playing some comedy.

We got to cope as best we can.

So thanks to Bill Crystal, everybody else.

We'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast.

We'll see you all then.

Peace. Everyone on the idiot box.

Come on out, sell me those thoughts.

Call me out with the blue light eyes.

Nervous, tired, desensitized.

Let it go.

Let's go All that's skinned against the glass All that's skinned against the glass All these things we think we're left, all this time we can't get back All of us on the idiot box Come on outside, let me hear those thoughts Call me out when you see the signs Disconnect and recognize, let me know Let's go!

All that skin against the glass All that skin against the glass

All these things we think we lack

All this time we can't get back

The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.