S2 Ep1015: Bill Kristol: The High Cost of Stupidity

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Speaker 4 Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Trouble inside the Trump administration. Big trouble in the markets, trouble in the world.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It's Monday, so it's Bulwark Editor-at-Large, Bill Kristol. Hey, Bill, what's up?

Speaker 2 Hanging in there, Tim. How are you?

Speaker 4 I was just talking to your pal Stan Boyger.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 People can check out over on YouTube on the Bulwark Takes feed about his paper about how stupid these tariffs are.

Speaker 4 They didn't even do their own math right. And we were joking at the end that,

Speaker 4 you know, the Schotten Freude of watching all of 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.

Speaker 4 You know, so it's mixed feelings.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 A point you've been making, I believe, online and on the bulwark on various podcasts and on the bulwark as well over the last several days.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I mean, Vorga's thing is amazing because, as he said, he's anti-tariff anyway. He's a free trader.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So it's really, it is like, let's have a bad policy and then execute it horribly.

Speaker 4 You know, you hate to hand it to Elon Musk, but

Speaker 4 it's not just the AEI. It's not just us at the bulwark.

Speaker 4 It's not 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?

Speaker 4 He was sub-tweeting the president this morning.

Speaker 4 Some issues on the home front with the shadow president sub-tweeting the president. And he just posted the video of this classic free market fundamentalist text, the pencil.

Speaker 4 And I want to get your former Republican muscles pumping this morning, so I want to play a little bit from the pencil.

Speaker 6 There's not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 To make the steel, it took iron ore.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 This red top up here, the eraser, bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya. where the rubber tree isn't even native.

Speaker 6 It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government.

Speaker 6 It was a magic of the price system,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 Beautiful. Filton Friedman, the simplicity.
Are you feeling good? Are you feeling like a Straussian again, Bill? How does that make you feel?

Speaker 2 That was such a fundamentalist kind of free market thing before Friedman. I think Friedman narrated it, but, you know, I think it was around like in the 50s or 60s.

Speaker 2 There was some organization whose name is escaping me that sort of promoted really like popular education and free markets.

Speaker 2 This was going to correct all the errors of the Dew Deal and of democratic socialism and stuff. And they had pamphlets.

Speaker 4 Hey, Dan, don't get our listeners mad about the pencil.

Speaker 2 Well, there's what's interesting about free trade, incidentally, someone made this point in an article over the last few days. John Gans, I think, free trade was an important part of the New Deal.

Speaker 2 People forget that. I mean, what's the most famous tariff in recent times? Smoot Hawley, 1930, Republican tariff.
What did Roosevelt do? He reduced tariffs in 1934.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 organization, so to speak, of the DGA.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like, back then, it was like tariffs raised prices on working people. And so

Speaker 4 a lot of the intellectuals in that era were against it, as you said.

Speaker 2 And tariffs historically

Speaker 2 could be gamed by the big corporations, the big businesses.

Speaker 2 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, and invest in modest amounts in the stock market. No, I know.

Speaker 2 Anyway, the Friedman thing, 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.

Speaker 2 Voyager might have explained this better, I'm sure, explained this better than I would. On the idea that our bilateral trade balance with every country should be zero, should be even, right?

Speaker 2 That I mean, not that we trade, you know, 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.

Speaker 4 That's comparative advantage and everyone has their specialized

Speaker 2 natural resources. It's so dumb.
I mean, it's so stupid.

Speaker 2 I mean, whatever the fancy arguments for some targeted tariffs on national security or other reasons, sheltering, you know, what are this called, baby industries, young industries and stuff.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is so damaging. And the markets correctly see it, right? I was talking with another economist this weekend, not stand in this case.

Speaker 2 I said, are you surprised by the severity of the market reaction or what really accounts for that?

Speaker 2 And he said, it is partly that the actual tariffs are going to damage the actual economy, prices, imports, and so forth.

Speaker 2 But it's also the...

Speaker 2 incredible stupidity and recklessness and willfulness that Trump and his team have shown.

Speaker 2 You know, the market is pricing that in now, which as you and I have discussed, they were sort of disdenying for the last three, five months since the election, right? It's not really going to happen.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 I don't even know if it would be the R-word S. I think this is the sub-tarded economic policy that has put, that has put this collapse in place.
It has no rationale at all across any level.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 That they were, that they did not recognize how reckless and stupid you guys were going to be.

Speaker 4 They didn't listen to it, had they 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.

Speaker 2 You know, I watched the clip of Besant. Yeah, he's such a bad defender of Trump.

Speaker 2 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 Trump.

Speaker 2 But Besson's super clever thing was, we should be glad the markets worked well. You know, like the actual computers were able to process trades

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I think they went down several hundred points. They literally rebounded like in three days, if I'm not mistaken, right?

Speaker 2 And the markets priced in correctly that Trump, I mean, whatever you think of Trump, obviously, but that he was going to be kind of a pro-business president.

Speaker 2 And mostly they priced in the fact that we were in a strong recovery finally after the Great Recession and it was going to continue.

Speaker 2 And Trump didn't mess it up, actually, because his tariffs are very limited in the first term. This is such a good case study, too, in what we've been arguing for quite a while.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Innocently, can I say that one friend of mine, acquaintance of mine on Wall Street, was reassuring me that Scott Bessant is going to be fine.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 the chart kind of looks similar to the SP 500 right now actually I wanted uh just zero in on 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.

Speaker 4 Let's listen.

Speaker 7 Remember, the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones. That kind of thing is going to come to America.

Speaker 4 Just what everybody wants. The screw and the screws.
We'll just have all the engineers overseeing the screw screwing.

Speaker 2 It's going to be automated, of course, once it comes back here.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But anyway, yeah, he's terrible. I mean, he really is awful.
Some other defender of Trump, that Bill Ackman guy in New York, attacked. This was good when they all start fighting each other.

Speaker 2 Well, the reason Luttnick is defending the tariffs is that his firm is a bond firm, Cantor, I think, in New York. And he's long bonds.

Speaker 2 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, you know, it's his book.

Speaker 2 He's defending his self-interest.

Speaker 2 So to get these these 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 just too bad we have to suffer for it it would be entertaining to watch all this you know and the penguins the penguins have been excellent memes i've got to say do you not agree with that this really smooth the penguin memes have been good the ackman thing

Speaker 4 is also just like because ackman supported trump people don't know this guy he's like he's a clown a rich clown who made money shorting the market during covet actually so he knows a little bit about this.

Speaker 4 And he has to come up with this convoluted theory for why these people that he put into the White House are ruining everything.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 Luttnick isn't secretly helping his bonds.

Speaker 4 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 hopefully that clears things up for

Speaker 4 Ackman. I wanted 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.

Speaker 4 I think that Dave Chappelle went pretty anti-woke and was celebrated on the right for his kind of anti-trans comedy.

Speaker 4 Seems like he's also had a turn already in the first, whatever it's been, 10, 11 weeks of this administration.

Speaker 4 And I think his little comedy routine from last week does a nice job of rebutting Howard Luttnick's screws theory. So let's listen to Chappelle.

Speaker 2 So iPhones can be $9,000?

Speaker 2 Leave that job in China where it belongs. None of us want to work that hard.

Speaker 2 The fuck is he thinking?

Speaker 4 I want to wear Nikes. I don't want to make them shits.

Speaker 2 What the fuck are you you doing?

Speaker 2 Stop trying to give us Chinese jobs.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 He should. And then Voyager could do a co-bill.

Speaker 3 What do you think makes the perfect snack?

Speaker 4 Hmm.

Speaker 8 It's got to be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient.

Speaker 3 Could you be more specific?

Speaker 4 When it's convenient. Okay.

Speaker 8 Like a freshly baked cookie made with real butter, available right now in the street at AM PM, or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at AM PM.

Speaker 4 I'm seeing a pattern here.

Speaker 8 Well, yeah, we're talking about what I crave.

Speaker 3 Which is anything from AM PM?

Speaker 8 What more could you want?

Speaker 2 Stop by AMPM, where the snacks and drinks are perfectly cravable and convenient. That's cravenience.
A.M.P.M., too much good stuff.

Speaker 4 Two and a half months in. It's pretty noteworthy that we have Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle already,

Speaker 4 you know, like pretty harshly coming out against the administration on different, you know, across different items.

Speaker 4 It was Rogan I played last week on the Venezuelan deportations and now Chappelle on this.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You know, that's changing the way. It's changing people's behavior.
Who knows, you know, what positive results could come if you're a conservative, right?

Speaker 4 And I do wonder if there's some like 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

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 This little moment here where we all were like, oh, we need to suck up to Trump and then everything will be okay.

Speaker 4 Maybe we might be sensing that that dark period in our history has already passed. I don't know.
Is that too hopeful?

Speaker 2 A little bit. Yeah.
I mean, I think the darkest period has passed or is passing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we're at the being concerned stage. Same with the donors, same with the Wall Street guys, same with everyone.

Speaker 2 So those people could have a lot of effect, the donors, obviously, within the administration to some degree, but also on members of Congress.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It could be vetoed if they pass that resolution withdrawing that grant of power.

Speaker 4 Is that true?

Speaker 2 I think so.

Speaker 4 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 an unprecedented time. So, you know, Jake is very good.

Speaker 4 He's over at Punch Bowl of analyzing the Hill. His point was that Trump could veto it.

Speaker 4 Could you imagine getting whatever you would need, however many Republicans you'd need to get to 67 in the Senate?

Speaker 2 Democrats need to hammer home, I think. They're not doing quite enough of this, in my opinion.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I mean, I was on a conference call recently, some Democrats explaining why they really couldn't do much.

Speaker 2 Maybe they should get a little out of the why we we can't do anything, is the minority mindset, and a little more into the let's try to do everything and 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.

Speaker 2 What do you think? 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.

Speaker 2 You could have real 2005-level Republican, you know,

Speaker 2 frantic panic, I should think, as he did over Iraq and Katrina in 2005. No, I don't know.

Speaker 4 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...

Speaker 4 Like there was not a sense that it was going to pass on the Hill.

Speaker 2 Right. They got defeated in the House the first time.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I got defeated in the House. And I remember kind of just watching that as an observer.
At that point, was, I guess, I was out of politics. That was after the McCain loss.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That's certainly very possible here. And if we're at the worst three-day drop since 1987 in the S ⁇ P 500, you know, how much lower could it go to force that?

Speaker 4 So there's already some chatter with regards to Don Bacon, who is the Republican representing the Omaha swingy kind of Omaha district in Nebraska. He has a resolution to take this power back.

Speaker 4 If you make it a privilege, but Mike Johnson isn't going to bring it up.

Speaker 4 If you bring a privilege resolution, then there's a way to force the vote. So he was asked about that over the weekend and kind of basically said, well, you know, maybe there'll be a time for that.

Speaker 4 Like, didn't say no, didn't say it's yes. He was wishy-washy as usual.
So maybe there is something there, you know, but again, like this stuff gets very complicated, right?

Speaker 4 Like then you have to get it to the Senate. The Senate idea of Thune and Johnson both, you know,

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But like, again, I don't understand why it should be fantasy world. Is that Brian Fitzpatrick, maybe a couple of the New York Republicans, Lawler, somebody like that? Who knows?

Speaker 4 And somebody that's retiring,

Speaker 4 they could just leave the Republican conference and work with the Democrats on a new speaker. And they could get a compromise speaker.

Speaker 4 put forth that could then really take the power of the purse back from Trump if he's being, if he's going to be so reckless that he tanks the economy.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 Because that, to your point, Bill, is like a Democratic job that I think could help nudge things along.

Speaker 4 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 wouldn't obviously give the Democrats everything they want, but would

Speaker 4 get a fucking Trump sycophant out of the Speaker's office. Anyway, we're in crazy times.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Right. I mean, Mike Turner, who is the House Intelligence Committee chairman, a Republican from Dayton, deposed by Trump's orders.
I don't know if he's going to run again or not. He could be speaker.

Speaker 2 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 could almost explicitly say this is for the rest of this fiscal year or something.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Obviously, tell everyone on most issues, you vote however you wish. And, you know, if the Democrats want to pass stuff, they can pass stuff.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wonder how it doesn't happen.

Speaker 2 It never happened, but it's rarely happened in American history.

Speaker 4 But people do change parties in American history.

Speaker 2 And occasionally at the state level, right? You've had these kind of compromise

Speaker 2 situations in state legislatures. So anyway, yeah, I agree.
It's worth getting out there. The Democrats need to think a little more imaginatively about this moment, too.

Speaker 2 They can't simply sit around saying we're in the minority by four votes, so we just can't do anything, you know?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 Shout out to the people that turned out at the hands-off protests on Saturday. But yeah, I mean,

Speaker 4 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 what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like, because I think if things don't get any better, the Democrats literally could do nothing. I mean, the James Carville thing is true.
Like they could probably play dead and win the House back.

Speaker 4 And who knows, 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? Right.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 right and rally people to you know like 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.

Speaker 2 I think it's kind of cost-free to try to do the stuff.

Speaker 2 If they stop you, then you say, well, they stopped us from trying to do the stuff. It's like the Democrats try to cut off funding for Iraq.
They, you know, they didn't do it.

Speaker 2 They knew they weren't going to succeed with Bush as president. But it got them on the, from their point of view, the right side of that issue.

Speaker 4 So 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

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But like staying in Congress and switching parties, Jeff Andrew did this the other way. during the Trump era, which is crazy.

Speaker 4 Trump has picked up a plus one on a person switching parties and no one has gone the other way. When I was growing up in Denton in Colorado, Ben Nighthorse Campbell switched parties.

Speaker 4 Jim Jeffords switched parties, Vermont, Arlen Specter, switched parties. So, like, and those are just off the top of my head.
I wasn't planning on this rant right now.

Speaker 4 So, I'm sure that there were others. Like,

Speaker 4 I don't know, at a time of extreme emergency,

Speaker 4 which maybe we're not quite at, but we're on the cusp of, might be worth at least

Speaker 4 stirring the pot with that a little bit, raising it as a possibility.

Speaker 4 One more tariff thing, because this relates to

Speaker 4 the other crisis.

Speaker 4 It's a major crisis if you're living in Kyiv 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.

Speaker 4 Kevin Hassett, your buddy,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And he's in the administration, chairman of the National Economic Council. And he was asked why Russia was not put on the tariff list by George Stefanopoulos.

Speaker 4 And I thought his response was pretty interesting. I want to play it.

Speaker 9 Why did the president not include Russia on the list of countries who are facing tariffs?

Speaker 10 There's obviously an ongoing negotiation with Russia and Ukraine. And I think the president made the decision not to conflate the two issues.

Speaker 10 It doesn't mean that Russia, in the fullness of time, is going to be treated wildly differently than every other country.

Speaker 9 But Russia is one of the only countries, one of the few countries that is not subject to these news tariffs, aren't they?

Speaker 10 They're in the middle of a negotiation, George, aren't they?

Speaker 9 Well, I'm asking a different question. And I just want to know what you're saying.

Speaker 10 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And whereas Ukraine, we can just bully around and whatever. And so Ukraine gets a 10% tariff.
Russia, zero. Great job, Kevin Hassett.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I've never, I mean, it's pathetic, those three this weekend. They were all on Sunday, I think, right? Bassett, but Besant, Hassett, and Lutnick.

Speaker 2 And what a crew.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it was across the networks. It was CBS, ABC, NBC.
I don't know what they got out of it.

Speaker 4 I guess Trump gets to see them humiliate themselves to stay in his good graces.

Speaker 2 I guess J.D. Vance, isn't he normally eager to get on these Sunday shows?

Speaker 2 Where was he this weekend?

Speaker 4 A couple of people have been noting this. Our poster vice president, who tweets almost as much as me and Bill.

Speaker 4 Not a ton of posting here. Some retweets, a couple retweets, you know, he's retweeting Walter Kern for some reason.
But last actual tweet from him, April 2, it looks like.

Speaker 4 So it does seem like there is some tension on the inside. I mean, the Elon Musk thing is not nothing.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like, made fun of him as, like, you know, being a Harvard-educated economist actually is a negative, not a positive. So

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: 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?

Speaker 2 Musk having done this will lead to more people on the outside being willing to be critical of Trump.

Speaker 2 If Trump and Musk and everyone were a United Front, the people who like Musk, it's amazing anyone does, but at least the fellow Silicon Valley bros and all these characters would be hesitant to be criticizing perhaps the policy.

Speaker 2 So you asked me earlier, can I praise Musk? I really can't praise Musk. I just can't do it.

Speaker 2 But I'm glad he is saying what he thinks about these terrorists, I guess.

Speaker 4 I want to go to 60 Minutes. Another thing I did a full video on last night because I was just so

Speaker 4 mad and sad about the whole thing. I just kind of wanted to get off my feelings immediately.

Speaker 4 The 60 Minutes 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.

Speaker 4 Just a couple of quick things. They looked at all of the names of the people who were on the list.

Speaker 4 We think that is a verified list. We are not 100% sure because the administration has declared state secrets.

Speaker 4 So they get to keep it as a secret who they disappeared to this concentration camp. And based on that list, they said 75% of the people had no criminal record at all.

Speaker 4 I think it was like 22% of the people did have a criminal record, but some percentage of that, it was like shoplifting or whatever.

Speaker 4 There was also some percentage of that where there were serious crimes. And then 3%,

Speaker 4 they couldn't verify the names. So, like the number of people that could be

Speaker 4 totally wrongly sent there based on their tattoos might even be greater than we thought.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They showed these horrible new pictures of him being stripped naked and like treated rough. You know, there's more details was provided by his lawyer at Immigrant Defenders.

Speaker 4 If you want to support that group, they're doing great work. You know, just about his background.

Speaker 4 60 Minutes looked back at, you know, Trisha McLaughlin, the spokesperson for DHS, had said that it wasn't just the tattoos in this case.

Speaker 4 She had posted a tweet saying that his social media post indicated sympathy to Trend Duragua. 60 Minutes looked at 10 years of his social media accounts and didn't find anything.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 situations seem very similar, frankly.

Speaker 4 So the whole thing is just unimaginable, like how bad it is. It's enraging.
We'll get to the Democrats in a second. Like, unlike the tariffs, the Republicans are just okay with this.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 They also show a lot of video from this prison. It's just horrifying.
And there's nothing. There's nothing.
There's no pushback at all. Civil liberties types, Rand Paul, nothing.

Speaker 2 No, it's, I mean, it's all horrifying. And

Speaker 2 the Republicans on the Hill have been pretty bad too. I mean, certainly within the administration, there's been just contempt.

Speaker 2 So the federal judge in this case, there are several cases, but Judge Boseberg in one of these cases has been very careful and cautious, I would even say, in what he can, can't order.

Speaker 2 Is there a 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.

Speaker 2 They're not saying, well,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I mean, that'll mean little contempt in court, though. That might be the case, too.

Speaker 2 But just, you know, making contemptuous, contemptuous statements about, oh, good, you go get him back from El Salvador.

Speaker 2 You have jurisdiction

Speaker 2 over the president of El Salvador.

Speaker 4 Well, just to your point on this on the judges, real quick, that today, the deadline is tonight. The judges issued an order for not Andrea.
This is the Maryland dad.

Speaker 4 And this is the case where the DOJ admitted fault that they wrongly sent him there.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 He had another 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.

Speaker 4 So they're just going to fully divide.

Speaker 2 We'll go through the form of requesting that he got back.

Speaker 2 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 who, Aaron Reichland-Bendlick, who's our friend who's been on a couple of book things, who knows everything about immigration law and policy.

Speaker 2 This guy has been arguing for administrations in a tough way,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he said, I can't understand what's happened here. We can't defend having made an error.
I'm going to, I think he asked the judge for 24 hours to try to figure out what was happening and so forth.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They also seem to be doubling down on other crackdowns internally on immigrants who have in no way fall into the category of violent criminals or even criminals.

Speaker 2 And in fact, fall into the category often of, so far as one can tell, law-abiding citizens who have American relatives, who aren't documented in many cases, but are living the kinds of lives we would want immigrants to live.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 4 I mean, rah-rah or nothing. I mean, like, there's definitely some of them that are rah-rah, tweeting about how, oh, these Democrats are defending the gang members.

Speaker 4 Like, they're trying, they're trying to make this into an issue. Right.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And people should watch the 60 Minutes thing because it's just so shocking. But yeah, as you mentioned, there are other stories popping up of people that are being detained.

Speaker 4 There's the 73-year-old grandfather in Lafayette here in Louisiana. There's a Cuban refugee here for 45 years.

Speaker 4 You mentioned we were 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so now they're going about and doing anything to grab.

Speaker 4 any other people to get like the deportation or detention numbers up and to and to scare people really on the scaring part, it's going to work. Like, I don't know about you.

Speaker 4 I was talking to people this weekend I know who

Speaker 4 are maybe citizens now here, but are from another country, talking about friends and family they have.

Speaker 4 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...

Speaker 4 if the risk is going to be you might be sent to Natchez in Louisiana or El Salvador.

Speaker 2 We're snatched at the airport for nothing or for unbelievably trivial failure to to fill out some form correctly. You've been here a zillion times.
You're a research scientist.

Speaker 2 You're a professor, a teacher, a tourist, whatever. So did you see that chart?

Speaker 2 I saw this online 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 on, you know, spring break week or something.

Speaker 2 But I mean, basically, it's not by foreign nationals, it's now down something like 12%.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and the Canadians, it's down like 40%.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then this chart was done by someone who's anti-tariff, so it shows you the tariff dates.

Speaker 2 But I think, as someone on Twitter pointed out or in the Blue Sky pointed out, I think it's probably more the immigration stuff that's actually right now leading people not to come here.

Speaker 2 The tariffs thing is not affecting them quite. So, yeah, the cruelty is the point and all that.

Speaker 2 And now I guess hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans are losing their temporary protected status today, I think.

Speaker 2 No, they're not going to deport 350,000 people at once, but suddenly they're all undocumented. They could be picked up walking down the street or picking up their kids at school.

Speaker 2 Imagine how it's going to be. It's a grotesque.
And what problem are we addressing? The border is closed.

Speaker 2 Okay, I mean, 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.

Speaker 2 If they do get over, even if they honestly should be given the least consideration for asylum, but they are just turning everyone away. The country is shut down in that respect.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 4 To scare people. Yeah.
So people don't come. And that's what it is.
And it will work.

Speaker 2 And to get them to self-deport so that we have a wider, so that we have what? A wider country with fewer of these people with Mexican names, I guess, or Latino, Hispanic names. I don't know.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. The white replacement theory.
I mean,

Speaker 4 Tom Holman advanced it. He's like the immigrations are now.
But no, I look, Pam Bondi was. on this weekend and she said, if you're a Venezuelan gang member, you should self-deport.

Speaker 4 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 going to call me?

Speaker 4 Are you going to accuse me a gang member because I have a fucking tattoo with a crown on it that says mom?

Speaker 4 Like, I don't know, you know, or are they going to look in my phone and see that I posted some meme that seems sympathetic to a foreign group? Like,

Speaker 4 and then I might get sent to El Salvador, you know? So they're intentionally trying to scare people and they, and it's going to work. They should be scared.

Speaker 4 It's fucking horrible, which takes me briefly again to the Democrats. I was talking to some of the immigration attorneys and I was like, what is your ask for them?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And their ask is, draw attention to this. Speak out like we can't.
There's a lot happening out there. You know, this could go away.

Speaker 4 Like these people in the 60 Minutes piece, the Philip Holsinger said, it seemed like they were ghosts, like the people that were being disappeared into this, the depths of this prison.

Speaker 4 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 i was like well is that has that happened and they were like not really i you know 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 you 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.

Speaker 4 I got him, 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

Speaker 4 fear. Pressure has to be brought to bear on this.
And I know JD Vance wants this fight, but I just, I reject this notion of like, oh, you shouldn't play into their hands.

Speaker 4 Like these are humans that we, what we're doing is unconscionable. And attention needs to be drawn to it.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So yes, you shouldn't have been, it was probably politically costly to defend Biden's border policy in early 2024 before he fixed fixed it, actually. This is different.

Speaker 2 This is like I was on another call with some Democrats and one of the people, kind of a pro-labor type, what you'd expect, I get, well, we shouldn't just be against tariffs. Some tariffs are good.

Speaker 2 The free trade regime has had problems.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 actually, in this case, a couple of sensible Democrats said, we don't have to even get into this.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They look at the markets, look at everything. We're hecking a recession because of Donald Trump and the the Republicans who won't stand up to him.
Period. It's the same here.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you just have to say, this is Trump being crazy. And do you want your neighbors being deported? And on this other call,

Speaker 2 I think these calls are probably off the record. So I shouldn't be saying all this, but it doesn't matter since they're just generic Zoom calls.
I mean, not generic.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That Haitian immigrant thing,

Speaker 2 they said. And I actually interrupted, which you're not supposed to do and said, we don't have zero evidence the Haitian immigrant issue helped the Republicans.
I looked at two seconds at the polls.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We can't speak up for any people from any country in Central America or Latin America, I guess. I think it's both wrong.
It's just wrong. A.

Speaker 2 B, even if people don't agree with you entirely on it, they respect you for standing up for your principles.

Speaker 2 People forget that part of politics too, where, you know, people are capable of saying, I don't, I'm not sure I agree with that person. But you know what?

Speaker 2 I'm impressed that he said what he thought.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 that have immigration.

Speaker 4 All right. Sound like Bill Crystal, people.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 it might be a way to get you some attention.

Speaker 4 All right. There's a North Carolina state Supreme Court race.
Allison Riggs won by 700-ish votes over Jefferson Griffin, the Republican.

Speaker 4 There was this three-judge panel this weekend in North Carolina that ruled in favor of a recount on 65,000 votes.

Speaker 4 They've got to, what they call cure them to make sure that the people that made the votes are real people.

Speaker 4 The judge said that you have 15 days to find these people. It's mostly expats.
I think you can see what the strategy is here.

Speaker 4 I can imagine, imagine, you know, the expat vote would be more sympathetic to the Democrats.

Speaker 4 Even conservative lawyers to say, I think the former state party lawyer has spoken out on this, the Republican State Party lawyer in the state. Like, this is crazy.

Speaker 4 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 in North Carolina is 5-2, so it might

Speaker 4 raise 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.

Speaker 4 And I think a sign of obviously what they would have done had 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.

Speaker 2 I think that's one of the, I mean, obviously what's happening is important in its own right.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This is April, and they're going after particular ballots that they think would be more democratic.

Speaker 2 But I think it is a harbinger of what will happen in states where Republicans have control of the state legislature conceivably in 2026, certainly almost, well, certainly, but more likely even in 2028.

Speaker 2 I mean, it is not a good sign that they have, after all of this, they win the presidency, they win both houses of Congress, and they want to steal elections.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I discussed this with Tom Jocelyn a little on my podcast yesterday, the Bulwark Sunday podcast. It started the way out fringes and has now migrated fairly close to into Trump world.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But again, it all helps corrupt, you know, lay the predicate for the further challenges, right?

Speaker 4 You also wrote this morning in the newsletter that I would point people to, but just very briefly, kind of about the hubris of Trump and what we're saying.

Speaker 4 And there's one little item in that newsletter I wanted to

Speaker 4 chew over with you really quick. According to a DC source with knowledge of the plan that's still being developed, Trump has commandeered Saturday, June 14th, the 250th anniversary of the U.S.
Army.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 2 Hmm.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 that's ominous, I guess.

Speaker 2 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 D.C.
government didn't want to do it.

Speaker 2 Republican members of Congress were like, what are we doing? We don't have military parades here all the time in the U.S. just because you're a president.

Speaker 2 I mean, there was no commemorating some victory or something in a war.

Speaker 2 And now the Army was going to do some normal celebrations of his 250th birthday on bases and in communities and at cemeteries and that kind of thing. And now Trump's turning it into this,

Speaker 2 wants to turn it, and we'll see what happens into this giant military parade four miles from Arlington up through to the White House, I suppose. It happens to, quote, happens to be his birthday.

Speaker 2 Andrew Egger and I both wrote about this in Warning Shots. Andrew wrote a very good lead item on Trump's hubris, the Trump administration's hubris in a whole bunch of areas.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That really kind of settled into my gut because it's kind of been where my mind is going. On this podcast, maybe a month or two ago, Ann Applebaum mentioned the book The Captive Mind.

Speaker 4 It's a 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 Politz or Once it won some literary war in the mid-20th century.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it just kind of talks about, you know, how the authoritarian mindset took over.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 We're not going to 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.

Speaker 4 It's kind of a heavy topic for the very end of the podcast, but you, I'm sure, read JVL's newsletter. I wanted to get your two cents on it.

Speaker 2 I devoted my own little newsletter Friday morning entirely to quoting from and praising JVL's newsletter and elaborating on it a bit.

Speaker 2 I've been very struck by this since February, since the Vance speech in Munich, the Hexet speech, the degree to which Europeans saw, whoa, this is really not just the normal zig and zag of policy.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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, and then Trump's, well, 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.

Speaker 2 I mean, the combination of all that, I had dinner as pure chance with a a central European businessman, a small group, last week here in D.C. He's pro-American, totally pro-American.

Speaker 2 There's businesses that do stuff in America and so forth. Wentz has a kind of think tank that's kind of pro-Atlantic, pro-American.
And Heath says it's fundamentally changed.

Speaker 2 Now, JVL says it couldn't be put back together again.

Speaker 2 I resist that because... I want to resist it, I suppose.
And so I don't know.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 I think she was the last president.

Speaker 4 She didn't last as long as it had a lettuce.

Speaker 2 Right. And she was like a terrible, you know, total disaster.

Speaker 2 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 Labor victory finally over her successor.

Speaker 2 But that's a parliamentary system, and we have no mechanism to remove Trump.

Speaker 2 And whereas in the 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.

Speaker 2 Now we get Vance, which really is worse, I suppose.

Speaker 4 I don't know, as bad.

Speaker 2 So this is where I think JVL 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.

Speaker 2 New government, you know, old Republican Don Bacon's president of the United States or something. I don't know.
Or, you know,

Speaker 2 some coalition government comes in. So, four years of Trump and Vance,

Speaker 2 and even if they lose, then no guarantee that this doesn't come back yet again.

Speaker 2 I think the odds are unfortunately decent that this is a real end of an 80-year period, not a big zig in a succession of zigs and zags.

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 well, that's where I'm at, too.

Speaker 4 Just like your inter-social democrats have been popping out, like mine are like the parliamentary system. Man, I'm ready to junk our constitution.

Speaker 4 My little pocket constitution, I put into one of those little

Speaker 4 library boxes in the neighborhood. It's like, okay, I'm going to

Speaker 4 talk to me about the constitution we gave the Germans.

Speaker 2 No, I've had that thought, too, and it's not a foolish thought, of course.

Speaker 2 But I just want to come back to the one thing that you stressed so well, really, honestly, over the last, not just the last, we've stressed it for several years, honestly, the first term we stressed it, but now, really, really.

Speaker 2 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, aid to Ukraine, NATO.

Speaker 2 I mean, we have a strong president, so it's a little harder if you just have the legislature.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the fact that they're doing, 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.

Speaker 2 Privately, they're very upset, very upset, Tim, really. You know, they're just really in a state about this.

Speaker 2 I've heard they've had a strong conversation with Howard Luttnick. I mean, these are elected members of Congress, you know, and they're totally failing in their responsibility.

Speaker 4 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, everybody.

Speaker 4 More good stuff to come. That's why I tried to get Dave Chappelle in there.
This way, you know, I'm trying to give you guys some gifts, little, just little presents from me.

Speaker 4 I don't play Trump's voice almost ever. I'm playing some comedy.
You know,

Speaker 4 we gotta 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.

Speaker 4 Everyone on the idiot box, come on outside, let me hear those thoughts.

Speaker 4 Call me out with the blue light eyes.

Speaker 4 Nervous, tired, desensitized, let it go.

Speaker 4 Let's go.

Speaker 4 All that skin against the less.

Speaker 4 All that skin against the glass.

Speaker 4 All these things we think we left.

Speaker 4 All this time we can't get back.

Speaker 4 All of us on the idiot bars. Come on outside and hear the stars.

Speaker 4 Call me out when you see the signs.

Speaker 4 Disconnect and recognize the den.

Speaker 4 Let's go.

Speaker 4 All this skin against the blessed. All that skin against the bless.

Speaker 4 All these things we think we lack.

Speaker 4 All this time we can't get back.

Speaker 4 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.