S2 Ep1014: Adam Kinzinger: Mortal Damage to the American Empire

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Could not have a better day to bring back our friend.

He's a former Republican Congressman from Illinois.

He served in the Air Force during Iraq and Afghanistan.

He's the founder of Country First, and he writes a Substack newsletter, and he's got to turn off his notifications.

It's Adam Kinzinger.

What's happening?

Body, what's going on?

How are you?

Thanks for having me on on the day when the stock market collapses.

That's a good day to have me.

Thanks for saying that.

Nothing happening.

You know, we just have like MAGA conspiracy blogger, white nationalists running the National Security Council and the stock market collapsing, global economic crisis,

the Canadians dunking on us.

Nothing much to talk about.

So we'll get into all that.

But I wanted to start.

You texted me yesterday this clip.

And we're 90s kids, you know.

So

Ferris Bueller's Day Off was obviously pretty formative.

Uh, I don't know how old you were, but you know, when I was when I was 11 or 12, getting into my troublemaking phase,

catching Ferris Bueller's Day Off

on home video, I don't think I'm quite old enough to, I didn't see it in the theater.

I was born in 78, so however old that is.

You probably saw it in the theater then.

You might have seen it in the middle.

I did, brother.

I saw it.

We were rebels.

That's legit.

Well, it's funny.

In that movie, Ben Stein,

who has now become a big Trumper, gave the class a lecture on a topic.

And

the elder millennials and young Gen Xers among us will remember what it was.

But for everybody else, let's take a listen to Ben Stein speaking to Ferris Bueller's class.

In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the anyone, anyone, the Great Depression, passed the anyone, anyone, a tariff bill, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which

anyone raised or lowered,

raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government.

Did it work?

Anyone?

Anyone know the effects?

It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.

It did not work.

Smoot Hawley, actually.

I would think that Trump has seen that, right?

Like,

that's why it's important to talk about, because if he all of a sudden sees Ben Stein saying that Smoot Hawley didn't work, And yeah, that's been the interesting thing, by the way, Tim, is I've seen like a few Republicans try to

reimagine Smoot Holly actually as having worked, which is the weirdest thing.

And they blame the recession on

further into depression on something else.

Kind of feels like where we're at now when you see some of these guys saying, well, we're just in essence front-loading the recession because we were going there anyway and it was going to be way worse.

And now we're front-loading the recession.

And you got to trust Donald Trump.

He knows what he's doing.

I mean,

it's it's madness.

Trump's more of a musical queen.

You know, he's familiar with Katz, fan of the opera, Top Gun.

I don't think he might not have seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Probably true.

Yeah, it didn't work.

No, it didn't.

And we're finding that out as we tape right now.

The Dow is down, looks like another 2.5%.

NASDAQ down another 3% plus.

I mean, it got slaughtered yesterday, the markets.

We saw job losses already in various sectors.

You know that, I mean, any minute now, they're going to be the little signs outside of stores because the businesses don't want to get, don't want the customers to be mad at them, that they're like, sorry, we had to increase the avocado prices, but it's the tariffs, it's not me.

You know, that's coming.

And it's like, the Trumpers have no rationale for it, really.

I mean,

there's going to be some magical golden age that come off the back of it.

And then our old friends and non-friends, but the people from the pre-Trump time, like even Ted Cruz is out there like, well, I don't really like tariffs, but this is just a negotiation, right?

And it's like, no, I don't, I don't think so.

It doesn't seem like a negotiation to me.

I think the dude is just insane and like really loves tariffs.

And now he's going to be in a fucking stubborn off with every world leader around the globe.

So it doesn't seem great.

What do you make of it?

Yeah, look, my wife said something yesterday that I guess I had, I mean, I've thought about it, but not really these starka terms, which is like, you know, everybody's like, well, why is Trump doing this?

And so the assumption for the MAGAs is this is some grand negotiating tactic, like you said here's the truth i think i think this makes him feel powerful now listen if you're a true narcissist i don't even know if narcissist is what he is i think like and i mean this narcissistic yeah whatever the worst possible thing is megalomaniac all you care about is feeling powerful in the moment.

You're impulsive and you want to feel powerful.

You want to have people grovel to you.

And honest to God, I mean, there's no better way to be powerful, frankly, than to tank the world economy.

And he may not be intentionally tanking the world economy, but what he's doing is saying to the rest of the world that we're in control, which we aren't.

He's going to learn that soon.

And here's the other thing.

So we're going to watch, you know, the stock market's going to fall.

There's going to be a day.

It could be, you know, ultimately by the time people listen to this today or whatever, where it's going to kind of settle and you may get 100 points in the green at some point because ultimately this is just, it's when people make the decision, okay, now it's gone down enough.

I'm going to invest some money.

But that's the initial hit of what we're seeing from the tariffs.

That's the emotional stuff.

The deep tariff stuff is going to last over the next, frankly, five or 10 years.

You know, we talk about supply chains.

I'm watching even Mark Wayne Mullen, who says, well, it's real easy.

You don't want the tariffs.

Just build your company here in America.

Okay, it's a great idea.

First off, you're then saying that that company can't really trade anywhere else around the world just to America.

But let's say you're a company that trades primarily in America, you sell primarily in America.

Great.

It's going to take you at least five years to build a factory in the United States, by the way.

And by the way, there's a 99% chance that the next president of the United States will see the follies of this and lift the tariffs.

So this isn't doing anything to return supply lines.

And by the way, supply, this is another big point.

Supply lines in the last five years have been rapidly onshoring or near shoring, including, by the way, Mexico and Canada, from China, who we were supposed to not like like in the past after COVID.

So COVID created a lot of restoring of supply lines.

And instead of like taking that and incentivizing that like we should have been doing, we've instead put these massive tariffs.

So we're going to shoot ourselves in the sack.

I mean, that's what I said yesterday.

It's like, this is a self-imposed wound for absolutely no reason.

And this, China loves it, man.

They're going to be so powerful from this because they're.

they're picking up the slop that we were leaving behind.

Yeah, two thoughts on that.

And, you know, one is just on on the Trump psychology.

There's also the notion that, you know, getting inside Trump's brain is not a fun process, but you have to think about this.

Like the dude became president fucking twice.

Right.

Everybody told him it was insane.

The first time he had no chance of winning.

He didn't think he had a chance of winning.

He won.

He gets indicted four times.

Doesn't have a chance of winning.

You know, has his first re-election campaign event in his house in Mar-a-Lago.

The only guy that shows up is the guy in the brick wall suit.

Even Matt Gates was like, I got to wash my hair that day.

Nobody thought he could come back except us deranged, never Trumpers, who are like, no, I mean, he might still win again.

He comes back.

So

he has, in addition to his megalomania, he also like really has bought the thing that like everybody is wrong, all the smart people are stupid and Trump is right.

Like he really, I think he deeply believes that.

And so in this, in a situation like this, when all the smart people and the economists and the FT are out there saying,

yeah, the globalists think it's going to crash, Trump is there like, no, they were wrong before.

They were wrong on this.

They were wrong on the fires.

You know, they didn't realize it was the water.

They didn't let the streams go down there.

It's only Trump that knows all this stuff.

I really think that he's embraced all that.

And so it's hard to, like, rationality cannot break through.

So, I mean, that's the one side of it.

And then to your point on the onshoring, it's like, it's all so fucking stupid.

We're tariffing Madagascar, like 35% or something.

Like 75, 70% of the world's vanilla comes from Madagascar.

It's like, why?

What are we doing?

Are we in a

trade battle with them over what?

Like, Madagascar is screwing us on

the vanilla.

You know, it's like your vanilla latte, you want it to be more expensive now by 35%

to get one over on Madagascar?

What do you want them to buy more from us?

You know, you want them to start buying more jeans?

Well, yeah, and the issue of like Russia.

I mean, okay, the MAGA defense now of not tariffing Russia, North Korea, Belarus, you know, all the bad countries is, well, we don't trade with them anyway.

First off, that's not true.

We do trade with Russia.

It's $2 billion.

It's not a ton, but we trade more with Russia than we do with probably Madagascar and any of these other little places that we put a bajillion percent tariff on.

And then we tariff, of course, Penguin Island, you know, and then the Diego Garcia, the only asset on Diego Garcia is a United States military base.

I mean, what it goes to show, and then you get into, I even saw Jim Kramer, a clip of him basically on CNN, like, yeah, I feel like a sucker.

And by the way, I just want to say, for people that admit they were wrong, give them grace.

We need this, right?

It would feel very good to dunk on the people that admit they were wrong, but that's what we need.

And, you know, we all, at least maybe not you original Never Trumpers, but we all have been in the position where we we had to come to Jesus on that.

I don't know.

I might want to dunk on him.

Yeah, we can dunk on him.

He's fine specifically.

Yeah, I was going to save it for the end.

I had to fuck around and find out segment of the pod.

I was going to save it for the end, but why don't we flip it?

It's Friday.

I'll do the serious part.

I have a dark part.

We'll do it now.

Here we go.

There are a couple people I wanted to shout out.

There's a fella.

We'll be nice to the first fellow.

There's a fellow, Richard Hanania.

I think he did some pretty racist stuff in the past.

I don't really know his whole background, but, you know, everybody can turn over a new leaf, I guess.

He was tweeting yesterday.

He's a very popular blogger in the red-pilled tech world.

Mark Andreessen and those guys.

Read him.

Okay.

Anyway, he wrote this yesterday.

For those asking, yes, voting for Trump was a mistake.

I thought we'd get a repeat of the first administration, but we didn't.

The signs were there.

I just did not take my own ideas about the awful elements of MAGA seriously enough.

Here's the thing.

On the one hand, it's like, we all fucking told you it wasn't going to be like the first administration.

Anybody with eyes know it was going to be like that, but okay.

But the kind of hilarious part of it is like it's only been 70 days.

It's like it took 10 weeks for people to start doing the I screwed up thing.

I mean, even I thought it would take, you know, six months, a year.

I did too.

I did too.

Well, here's it.

Since we're going to dunk on it, let me just say this too.

Like,

okay,

I got it.

Your financial pocketbook is taking a hit.

So now that it's affecting you financially, right?

Now you all of a sudden care.

Okay, good.

I'm glad that brought you over.

What about when you had heard about Russia kidnapping 30,000 children from Ukraine and erasing their identity?

And then you saw Donald Trump say, Yeah, I don't know whose fault this war is.

And Putin is actually a pretty good guy.

We get along.

And you see J.D.

Vance say, Frankly, I don't care what happens in Ukraine.

Or you watch the missiles from Russia blow up high-rises in Ukraine or blow up grain ships, shut down a grain corridor to starve Africa.

So that wasn't the thing that made you dislike Trump.

It was that all of a sudden your gajillions of dollars are now only bajillions of dollars.

And that's what made you finally stand up.

Okay, I'm glad you came around.

But a lot of us, it's not the financial side.

Like, I would actually take a recession if we were a decent country again over an amazing economy in an evil country.

It's the human aspect of this.

Like, look, we can want to deport people that are here illegally.

We can want border security, but you know what you don't need to do is do an ASMR video of dragging chains so that people can sit around and get their goosebumps up and feel like they're watching a patriotic video as families are torn apart and sent to Latin America.

That is inhumane.

That didn't do it.

It was the financial stuff.

Good, but I'm glad you came around.

So welcome to the team.

I hope, though, in the future, maybe you actually care about decency and not just the finance.

Let's get that on TikTok.

That was a good turn on the TikTok camera for Kinzinger right now.

I don't know if this segment's going to need music because I feel like there's going to be a lot of this.

I'll talk to Jason about this.

We might need a theme song for the fuck around and find out segment.

I've got one more, though.

I've got a short one.

Dave Portnoy over at Barstool, the founder of Barstool Sports.

He supported Trump.

His spiny senses had started to tingle during the Signal Chat situation, which he did a big rant about how incompetent that was.

And here he is yesterday on his day trading show.

Trump has put his tariffs all over the place.

Get some wacky formula new tariffs.

And everything's in the shitter because of it.

I'm down 7 million bucks.

Down 7 million.

How many do you think it's going to take to go for, how many million do we got to lose before we can go for Kami Kamala and realize that maybe the tax rate going up by 2% wasn't actually the biggest financial threat to your life?

Isn't that amazing when you think about it?

Like this whole, oh, well, they were going to increase our tax rates is a fraction of what it's going to cost these people and losses.

It's amazing.

A fraction of a fraction.

A fraction of a fraction.

And so, yeah, I mean, look, Port Loy,

I guess there's part of me that, again, I maybe I'm too young to be this old, but it's like, how is it that somebody like him is somebody we look to for how the political tone is going to go?

This is a guy that drinks way too much, nothing against drinking, but he drinks way too much.

And then he does videos where he's sitting on his beach house in Florida.

And all he does on his videos is complain.

It's all he does.

This guy's like literally, and I give him respect.

He built something out of nothing.

He was originally just passing out newspapers as a kid, basically, and started this company.

Frankly, Tim, my time in politics, this was a big annoyance of mine, is going to meet with like people that are worth half a billion dollars or billions of dollars.

And they sit with you and complain about the parts of government they don't like.

And I always left there feeling like, wow, money certainly doesn't make you happy because it doesn't make these people happy.

Anyway, this is the part of the show where me and Kinzinger start to talk about our transition towards Bernieism.

Yeah.

If you want to radicalize

a classical liberal into Bernieism, all you got to do is make them spend time with cranky billionaires, whiny billionaires.

It is enough.

It's a radicalizing experience.

I know a guy that

is an independent oil producer and just worth a ton of money.

And every time I met with him, he'd be complaining because oil's down to 68.

He's only going to make however many millions this month.

I'm like, bro, I'm hoping to make as much as you make in a month in an entire lifetime, right?

And I would be happy about that.

I would be excited.

But listen, if it takes $7 million, the good thing I'll give Portnoy some credit for is it's much easier for him for his business to basically be a Trump bro no matter what.

Because that's kind of what that group wants.

When he does speak out, it has an impact, and I respect that.

And I think when he spoke out about the signal chat, that was important as well.

And so I will encourage him to do that.

Have you talked to that oil guy?

Because, you know, I was talking yesterday with Tracy Alloway who's at Odd Lots, and she was pointing to the Dallas Fed survey where they like survey a bunch of oil and gas guys.

And it's like, things aren't actually great in the oil and gas sector right now.

The idea that this is going to be a boom time of drilling for liquid gold because Trump is going to unleash the animal spirits.

It's

not exactly what's happening.

No, I think oil's down 8%, even either today or in the last couple of days.

And, you know what?

It's got to hover around the 70%.

I learned this from Landman, by the way, one of the most annoying shows I've ever seen.

I'm sorry.

We don't need to get into it.

But like, how many times do you have to go back to the same storybook?

Okay, anyway, what I learned in Landman.

As a homosexual,

the notion of a show about a Landman is so unappealing that I have no idea what you're talking about.

But go ahead.

Oh my god.

Well, here's when I knew I wasn't going to like it, quick aside, is when they're in the bar and she comes over and she's like, guys, we got a special on Bud Light.

And Billy Bob Thornton goes, how's that going for you?

And she goes, like a fart in church,

because of Bud Light, right?

Anyway, so, but Landman taught me that $70 is about where oil producers need to be to be in a nice sweet spot between cheap oil and good production.

And we're going to be under that.

You're going to see a lot of these independent producers, once again go under if this continues and it's all because the people that are speculating on the price of energy are probably rightly assuming the economy is going to go into recession when the economy goes into recession people don't use oil oil goes down and and it just furthers the recession in the energy community and i live in texas now it's going to hurt here it's another group of people that didn't see what was right in front of their nose

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All right.

I want to get a little, well, it might go darker, it might be lighter.

I was interested yesterday as the takes were flying by two things that you and my colleague Jonathan V.

Last, JVL said.

You gave kind of the bright side of this argument, and he gave the dark side,

as is his tendency.

you wrote this.

This is the beginning of a massive fall of MAGA.

No amount of division, fear-mongering lies, and cheap lines will overcome the fact that you just took many people's prosperity just because it makes you feel powerful.

Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end.

It's optimistic.

Look, JVL wrote this, and just like that, the age of American empire, the great talk Americana, ended.

We cannot overstate what has just to happen.

It took 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the U.S.

economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.

So, Adam Kinzinger, was yesterday the end of MAGA or the end of America?

Well, look, honestly, I do agree with JVL.

I don't think it's irreparable, but yeah, I mean, I think that's the thing I'm trying to get my arms around that I can't yet is literally we may have just taken everything that you and I learned about post-World War II.

By the way, for anybody that somehow looks back at the pre-World War II era as a wonderful time in America, it wasn't.

America, it's been great to live in America since World War II.

That's about it, right?

And so I feel like we have just bombed that whole order.

And now, let's say we get, you know, Jesus H.

Christ as president in the next administration.

How do you get Europe and all these other countries to trust the United States of America again?

I don't know.

So I do think this has done mortal damage to at least the American empire, if you will.

But I also think that when you hit people's pocketbooks, right, I've always thought that part of America's problem has been our success.

We've been so comfortable that we have the luxury of hating each other and being annoyed by transgender issues and being annoyed by Bud Light because they sent a can to somebody we didn't like because we're comfortable.

It's like Maslow's hierarchy, right?

Let's call that those arguments over Bud Light.

That's like self-actualization, sort of.

Like you can, you can argue about the pinnacle of issues, but you take away your economic prosperity that most Americans have felt.

Even those that are in challenging financial positions have never really had to worry about starving on the street.

You start taking that away, and all of a sudden, your interest starts working down that pyramid.

And I got to tell you, I think once you mess with people's financial livelihood, there's nothing you can do to bring them back to saying that Donald Trump is good.

Not everybody, look, there are some.

I mean, literally, Donald Trump could skin a cat alive on TV and they wouldn't care.

I think there are people that once they start really feeling that economic pain, maybe will never admit they were wrong, but will change how they vote in the future.

I hope you're right.

The concern I have, the thing that dances around my head on that is I basically used to say exactly what you just said, like in 2018 and 19, and then COVID happened.

Yeah, I know.

And like the thing, my shtick was always when I was going, like when I was doing my book tour, you know, a common question a lot of interviewers would ask me is, what will break the spell?

Like, how will things, what will change things?

You know, what will make these people come to the light?

And my answer then was always, like, you know, it's going to take some outside shock, right?

Like, like, they're going to have to be forced into seriousness.

There's going to have to be some other event that

makes people come to terms with the fact that this is silliness in games.

And then we had a global pandemic, and people got fucking crazy.

People got even crazier.

And so that kind of shook my confidence that an outside negative event will

bring people back towards reality or seriousness.

Now, in that case, it was the Chinese or whatever.

It was either

Chinese incompetence or bad luck or whatever, but it came from China.

In this case, I guess the argument in favor of it is like, it's pretty much just Donald Trump doing this.

Like, Donald Trump is just like, there's no, and I guess people could blame it on, could come up with something else to blame, but it's pretty much just Donald Trump.

Look, I think it's going to, it's going to ride on something here, which is, are the Democrats able, and it's always on them because they're the opposition party, let's just be honest, are they going to be able to form an argument pending this on Trump?

Because listen, 90% of every Republican in the House right now, I mean, I put myself in that position.

If I was a sitting U.S.

Congressman, what would I be doing?

I would be preparing my arguments for why somehow magically this is the Democrats' fault that the economy has collapsed.

And trust me, they will use whatever magic

thing to twist into telling you and convincing you that actually it's the Democrats that have caused this.

So Democrats, here's the point, and I know some listen to this.

You need to start formulating your arguments, pinning this on Donald Trump and on Republicans.

And by the way, please God, the answer is not further left.

It's not leftism.

I get it.

You know, there's a group of Democrats that still believe they lost the election because

they tried to appeal to people like me.

That is not true.

You have got to make the case to the middle American that you are the Bill Clinton Democrats again.

You care about the blue collar.

You care about the working class.

That is the only way you're ever going to come back and win.

What Corey Booker did in his filibuster that showed a fighting spirit.

Everybody has to show a fighting spirit.

But again, the key to the Democrats is this: I don't care if you speak for 25 hours or 25 seconds.

The only weapon you guys have is messaging.

That's it.

So go out and win the message here because that's going to determine who takes the ownership of this.

Because trust me, Donald Trump is very good, as you were saying, and even on the show yesterday.

He's an amazing political messenger.

He's going to find a way to pin this on you.

And you're going to be surprised and angry.

And you're going to go out and say, well, it's not my fault, of course.

He's president.

But unless you come up with a compelling argument, it will be your fault as far as America is concerned.

You know, during COVID, by the way, the left left went way too far.

It's a little less complicated to do that this time than COVID.

I mean, they control everything and the economy was fine before he came in.

Well, totally.

And if you think about, though, COVID, like, you know, yes, the right went too far in saying no masks ever.

We're going to have COVID parties.

The left, some on the left went way too far with like masks all the time.

I remember, was it my good friend Gavin Newsom or somebody that said like, when you go to the restaurant, take your masks down in between bites of food?

Like that kind of stuff annoyed people.

So so don't do the equivalent of that please trump sucks it's probably pretty good trump is really stupid and he bankrupt a casino and now he's bankrupting you that was that was probably yeah you know welcome in

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I want to go back to the JVL dark side

because,

as usual, he was channeling me because this is kind of what was rattling around my head before I saw that he wrote it, which is like, I really am not sure that it's fixable.

I really do think something fundamentally has changed.

And I don't mean whatever.

Like, it takes a long time for empires to collapse.

I know that you're a straight man, so you've probably spent a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire.

It took a long time.

It didn't just happen overnight, right?

It takes generations.

So I'm not saying that like the whole country is going to collapse or whatever.

We're going to become an anarchist Libya state.

But

the world has changed in a way that I don't think is fully reparable, right?

Like it just has.

And other countries are going to have to make calculations.

And they look at us and just be like, like,

you elected your stupidest American a second time after he got indicted, after he got convicted on criminal charges.

You put him back in there and now he's fucking us.

How could we possibly trust you?

How could we possibly trust that

you'll have a stable leaders in the future?

Like you're acting like a Libya.

Like you're acting like a failed state.

The world reserve currency is not the Turkish whatever.

Like the lira is not the world reserve currency because people are worried that they can't trust the government, the stability of those countries.

They felt like they could trust us.

You know, we've had decisions, but that our institutions were strong.

And I just think that that has changed permanently.

And there was one piece of evidence of that, which is Mark Carney speaking yesterday.

I want to play that for you.

At the same time,

Canada must be looking elsewhere.

to expand our trade, to build our economy, and to protect our sovereignty.

Canada is ready to take a leadership role in building a coalition of like-minded countries who share our values.

We believe in international cooperation.

We believe in the free and open exchange of goods, services, and ideas.

And if the United States no longer wants to lead,

Canada will.

I mean, that's crazy that that is real.

You know, I mean, we made mistakes Vietnam or Iraq or whatever, but Canada wasn't out there being like, seems like the U.S.

has joined the baddies, and so we got to find a new alliance.

That is a new thing that's hard to change.

Yeah.

And by the way, one of the great ironies is the conservatives were set to crush it in Canada, and that's not the case anymore because of Trump.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's a smart speech.

And here's the thing: what the Magas will tell you is, well, this is really good because we've always wanted the world to step up and do more.

And that's not really true.

Now, first off, I mean, yes, we will always wanted Europe to spend more on defense that's important we haven't wanted europe to basically become a competitor to us kick us out of the the realm and basically be a competition because listen you know when the united states for instance liberated south korea when we took down the nazis we took down the japanese we invested a ton of money in rebuilding those economies and we've gotten that back 100 200 maybe even a thousand times of what we've invested because we have great trade relationships obviously samsung you know, you think in South Korea, you think of BMW and Germany, whatever.

All this stuff has been beneficial to us.

We get to write the rules of trade for the world.

We get to be the ones to determine freedom of navigation of the seas.

This is one of the things that annoyed me about the signal chat more than anything.

JD Vance, you know, on there talking about how basically Europe needs to be cleaning up the Red Sea and the Houthis.

And, you know, stupid Pete Hexeth agreeing with it.

Well, guess what?

The United States Navy has always claimed to be the ones that are going to enforce freedom of navigation of the seas.

And by the way, every time we've bombed the Houthis up until the Trump administration, sometimes the French and always the British have been with us to help in those bombings.

But instead, we have basically said to the countries in the past, we are going to be in charge of freedom of navigation.

It's been beneficial to us.

And now all of a sudden, we're mad at Europe for not doing it, even though we said this was our responsibility.

And so what we're doing is we're giving up these leverage.

Look, I get it, the United States is a very generous country, and I honestly think we benefit from that generosity.

But if you think that for 200 years we've built this post-World War II order out of generosity and not because it does good things for us, you're insane.

This is amazing for us and we're blowing it up because somebody on Fox News wants to go on and make a five-second cheap line about how Europe needs to pull its own weight.

And it's insane.

And by the way, European, if you are invested in the American defense industry, look, I'm not giving you advice, but I would say get the F out of it because American defense industry, a good percent of its weapons go to Europe.

Europe has made it clear that they're going to buy European weapons now and get off American weapons.

Portugal just canceled the purchase of the F-35.

Canada is considering doing the same.

This is going to kill the American defense industry.

And then we sit around and wonder, what's happened to the American defense industry that we don't have enough shells to take on China, which, by the way, this administration actually doesn't want to take on China, let's be clear.

And anyway, that's my rant for the moment.

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Since you mentioned the bombing of the Houthis, that stuff is still ongoing.

It's kind of like gotten pushed out of the news, I guess, because what the world economy is collapsing.

And I don't know that Donald Trump really wants to talk about it for some reason.

But what do you make of what's happening?

And we've continued to send more jets over there, more bombings.

I mean, part of the spin from MAGA out of the signal chat situation was like, yeah, sure, it was kind of dumb, but the operation was a huge success.

It's like, okay, maybe, I guess, but like the seas aren't clear.

I mean,

we're still kind of getting into this.

I don't know if you want to call it a quagmire, but we're still involved over there.

So what's, I mean, you're kind of monitoring this stuff closer to me.

What do you make of what's happening over there?

Yeah, first off, they just shot down their third MQ-9 of ours.

They've shot down 17 MQ-9s, which are the unmanned drones, but this isn't like a small drone.

They're the size of jet airplanes.

They're expensive.

They just shot down their third in the last month.

So let's be clear about this.

They have anti-air capability, which is why the signal chat was so dangerous.

And so what do I make of it?

Look, we're doing the right thing in terms of, you know, when you find anti-air or you find cruise missile sites, you know, blowing them up or weapon stores.

Yemen is, by the way, it doesn't look big on a map.

I've been to Yemen, actually right before the Houthis took over.

It's a very dangerous country.

It's actually a huge country, and it's very rough terrain.

The UAE has tried to use troops in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia fought with Yemen for a long time and nobody can beat the Houthis.

I don't think we're going to beat them because we're not going to put American troops on the ground in another quagmire in Yemen.

So the best that we can hope to do, which again is not a bad decision, is try to degrade their weapons as they come in to open it up.

The problem though is the issue with shipping around Yemen is the insurance companies.

And you have to basically clear the threat to get insurance companies to start insuring ships again.

That's really the key to how to how to like kind of open up the Suez Canal.

So that's a big concern.

But really, if you actually want to starve Yemen of the weapons, you have to interdict them coming from Iran.

And I haven't heard the administration doing that.

And frankly, the last administration did a terrible job of that.

And so as long as we just kill them at the end point and we're not blowing up weapons in transit, I don't know what's going to happen.

I also think it's possible, I don't know anything that you don't, but it's possible that this military buildup is kind of a cover for a potential strike in Iran, which I hope if that happens, it's not based on Kaznet and Yahoo's asking us to.

I hope it's based on real intelligence that is saying, you know, for instance, Iran may be a few months away from a nuclear weapon.

Well, here's the good news.

Those are complicated issues, thorny issues.

Requires a lot of expertise.

People are familiar with what happened in UAE, with UAE and Saudi when they fought with the Houthis.

So, you know, there's a lot of ins and outs and what-haves.

So we want to have the best people involved.

And there's some news yesterday.

Four officials were fired from the National Security Council: Brian Walsh, who's a director of intelligence and a former top staffer for Marco Rubio.

Thomas Boudry, senior director of legislative affairs who previously served for Mike Waltz on the Hill.

David Faith, somebody that oversees technology and national security in the State Department, and another official.

They were fired because Laura Loomer,

who's tweeting at me right now, actually, the kooky, unapologetically white nationalist, anti-Muslim, conspiracy theorist, 9-11 questioner.

She was in the White House with her new face talking to the president, and I guess convinced him that he had,

I don't know, neocon spies in his midst and that he needed to fire them.

She also was pushing for the firing of Alex Wong, who's a guy I know who used to work for Romney.

He has maintained his job so far, but she's accusing him of being like a Chinese operative because of Wong.

He's of Chinese defense because his name is Wong.

So that's the kind of stuff we're dealing with here.

Somebody is just like, oh, the name's Wong.

He must be a Chinese spy.

So that person successfully engineered the firing of four national security officials, two of which are former high-level staffers for Rubio and Waltz.

So it seems like the MAGA blogger has more influence over our national security staffing than the Secretary of State or National Security Advisor.

So what do you think,

what do you think about that?

By the way, you must be a,

Miller's German, right?

Is that German or is it Spit?

Miller's German.

Yeah, so you and I must be German spies, right?

Kinzinger.

That's easy.

First off, someday you need to dedicate about 10 minutes to Mar-a-Lago face to understand that whole thing.

Yeah.

Christy Noam among them.

I have so many stories about Noam.

But anyway.

Okay.

And by the way, and I just want to say, I support people that want to get a little Botox, want to freshen up, whatever.

I just, I do find it strange when somebody's like, I'd like a whole new face.

Like, I'd like to completely change my face and become a different person that is like in the uncanny valley between human and robot.

Like, that's just, I don't, I don't really quite get the appeal of that.

And Christy Noam rolls out her new face with pigtails, you know?

Like, dude, what, what, come on.

And this is the woman that, by the way, when I was elected with her, She and her husband decided she was going to do no national TV because there were inappropriate comments about her on Twitter whenever she would do TV.

It went from that to this.

Anyway, okay, another story.

Laura Loomer, and I saw your guys' tweet back and forth.

By the way, Laura, if you're listening, you can be nice-ish and still batshit crazy, just so you know.

Yeah, just things aren't in conflict.

Nope.

The fact that she could go into the Oval Office is frightening.

This is somebody that is a 9-11 truther.

I was in a specific, I don't remember which committee it was, but a committee hearing that she interrupted back, you know, before she was in anybody's good graces.

She's nuts and literally nuts not just performance art here so she gets into the white house and in front of from what i understand in front of mike waltz is going after these and it kind of goes to him where he tries to defend these members and then she wins the fact that mike waltz was overruled by Laura Loomer and then still put his head down and walked out into Trump's helicopter like a whipped puppy.

Don't tell me you're an alpha male.

Okay.

Please stop saying that you guys are alpha males if you're going to let Laura Loomer come in and stomp all over you.

Okay.

I want to be very clear about that.

I met Mike Waltz in Bluffton, South Carolina when he was thinking about running.

And I'm like, what do you think about Trump?

I hate Trump.

Okay, I'll support you.

And I supported him.

He came in until he flew one day in Air Force One with Trump and he was totally different, right?

This is a beta male.

I'm sorry.

It's okay to be a beta.

Nothing wrong with it.

It's America.

It can be whatever you you want, but quit trying to pretend like you're an alpha.

And so, yeah, if I was him, I would have resigned at the spot.

I would have said literally, and maybe the president wants him to resign and everybody wins.

But I'd be like, Mr.

President, if you listen to her over me, I'm out.

You don't need me, obviously.

The fact that he then talked his tail and walked onto the helicopter is the one image of him I will never forget.

Never.

Yeah, it'd be one thing if it was like, you know, Doug Bergham over at the Interior and you got got some staffer who did some tweets in the past that were mean to Trump, and you got Laura Loomer going into the White House and like, Donald, we got to get rid of the

deputy undersecretary at Interior.

You might take one for the team on that one.

I mean, I wouldn't.

I would never be in Trump's candidate, but you could at least understand it.

You're the fucking national security advisor.

Right.

You're the national security advisor.

Your senior director for technology and national security.

Like, your top staffer that you brought with you from Congress that you trust, one of Rubio's top top experts on foreign policy, are getting fired because

Laura Loomer said so, somebody with no foreign policy experience, someone who thinks 9-11 was an inside job, she gets to be in charge of the staffing.

And that is just madness.

And it's just humiliating.

And to go along with it, like, why?

What are you, like, what are you even getting out of this?

And I throw on top of that, my old boss, Susie Wiles.

What is she doing?

I thought you were the chief of staff.

Yeah.

Isn't Susie Wiles supposed to be in charge of the staff?

She's getting, you know, layered, I guess, would be one way to put it, by Laura Loomer.

I don't know.

And I'll tell you, the crazy thing about this, this is a moment where I had implied, it looks like we may be planning a strike against Iran.

We are certainly having an anti-whatever campaign against Yemen right now.

You know, there's still the Ukraine-Russia war that we supposedly were going to solve in 24 hours.

You know, China is still growing.

And at the same time as all of this, you know, Laura, the Laura Loomer National Defense Establishment, we also are now saying that we're going to cut the military 8%

and 90,000 active duty troops.

Now, by the way, we have struggled in the past 20 years to grow the size of the army because without a draft, you have to grow through incentives.

And obviously, when the economy is good, it's hard to incentivize people to go in the army.

So that's the grand plan.

Yeah, totally.

Now they want to crush the economy, so people have to go into the military.

Yeah, maybe that's it.

Brilliant.

Brilliant.

But now they want to cut the military 90,000 people.

This is insane.

Was that in the budget or the reconciliation bill?

Yes, it's like put out as they're what they're trying to do in the budget or something.

Remember,

they want to cut 8%,

which they claim they do that through fraud, waste, and abuse.

Guys,

can we just drop the fraud, waste, and abuse thing?

It doesn't exist to the level that people think it does.

Is there fraud and waste?

Yes.

Is it 8% of the budget?

Oh, hell no.

And by the way, we used to fight tooth and nail with the Biden administration, with the Obama administration, that we had to grow the defense budget every year by more than they wanted to grow it, or they were peace hippies.

Now they're talking about cutting it 8%, and somehow that's still consistent with the conservative values we've always had since Ronald Reagan.

People, can we get rid of this idea that there is anything conservative about the GOP anymore?

The GOP is not conservative.

The conservative movement, it's dead, basically.

There's some people with conservative views, but the movement itself is dead.

Yeah, kind of like the American Empire.

Right.

So, you know, we've killed a lot of stuff the last 71 days.

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In addition,

while this is all going on, four Americans died in a NATO operation in Lithuania.

Their funeral, their service, was last night, first in Vilnius, and then they get brought to Dover Air Force Base.

Traditionally, the president goes to those things.

to kind of greet the families and the caskets.

Trump did not do that.

He flew to Doral, his golf club in Florida, where he went to meet with the Saudis

because the Saudi golf league, Liv, is having a tournament at his golf club.

So our American first president skipped the services of the dead soldiers to go covert with the foreign autocrat that is trying to disrupt.

the American golf tour.

That's what's happening.

The level of self-dealing corruption that we are going to discover someday, you know, we're discovering it now, but I think when the Trump administration is over and we're kind of doing the post-mortem, no matter what our country looks like, is going to be astounding.

And I really believe there will be new laws that will have to be passed in the wake of Donald Trump because of the absolute stuff that we used to think human decency just would prevent, that it doesn't prevent.

You know, you talk a ton, and I would encourage you to keep talking about it, about the cryptocurrency stuff.

I didn't even realize the depth of that until you had that one gentleman on who was really good talking about it.

Zeke, he's really good, yeah.

And the golf thing, you know, the PGA versus the live, like this is a big battle right now.

And shouldn't we be on the side of the PGA?

I mean, probably should the president not care about this given the fact that the economy is collapsing.

But if you were going to pick a side, shouldn't you pick the PGA side?

Yes, absolutely.

You should.

But he thinks the PGA is democratic now, all of a sudden.

So there's something about that for some reason.

Because anyway and then about the soldiers look these are four Americans one actually from my old district they're on a recovery vehicle they basically flip in a swamp that's like you know deep deep mud like kind of what you think about almost quicksand so it took a week for Lithuania and the United States to recover their bodies But if you actually look at what the Lithuanians have put out, their level of respect for these soldiers is something that'll put a tear in your eye.

I tweeted one of the videos yesterday that the defense minister put out.

They have been honoring these four soldiers as if they were their own.

And you see this like this brotherhood between America and Lithuania and America and frankly all of our allies.

And even though Trump and the leaders of the countries don't like each other, the brotherhood on the military level is still very strong.

And

I mean, literally, you see the whole country, a moment of silence for these four Americans.

They come back here and Donald Trump doesn't even bother to show up is,

you know, I'll just, all I can say is what I say basically to all this stuff.

Had this been Biden, this would be Fox News' front headline every hour that he didn't show up to Dover.

When it's Trump, like, that's crickets, right?

That's okay.

There's no consistency here.

Fox News and the Republicans no longer believe in any value.

The only value is what is good for me and what can I convince people is good for them.

That's it.

I will go to your feed and we'll put in the show notes that the link of the Lithuanian thing because I would like to see it.

This thing is sad.

Obviously the deaths are tragic, but it is.

It comes at this moment where it's like this, it's an artifact of like a previous time where like we really had these alliances and valued them and cared about them.

I've been noticing for the YouTube viewers, you'll see this for the listeners, Adam has a statue of liberty behind him as your backdrop.

Is that a comment on how like we should we need to give that back to the French or is there honestly man, I it's just time.

At least let them, you know, what we can do for the next three years is they could take like ownership in, you know, of it, even though we don't necessarily

keep it on Ellis Island.

Yeah, they can take ownership of it.

And then we should prepare to move it.

I think we should ship it back.

We're getting to that point.

We can give it to somebody else.

I mean, I don't, we're not really,

I don't think our shores are the shores of liberty.

All right.

You've kind of mentioned a couple of times.

I just do want to close because I think it's worth mentioning because the Russia deal.

I thought we did a deal.

What happened there?

We had this Trump and we sent Steve Wickoff over there and he met with Putin and Putin gave him that great painting.

And everything was going to be cool.

And it doesn't seem like everything's cool.

Seems like Russia is still bombing Ukraine.

Well, they are.

And look, you know, Zelensky comes here, gets chewed out in the Oval Office, and Zelensky has agreed to everything that we've put in front of him.

You know, a ceasefire in the Black Sea, which does not benefit Ukraine, because they've actually won.

I mean, this is like the most untold and amazing story is the Ukrainians defeated the Russian Black Sea Navy with no navy, you know, and energy infrastructure, you know, ceasefire, that that would have benefited Russia because of their energy, the bombings that are happening.

Look, Russia's not interested in peace, period.

And by the way, Donald Trump, who said he was going to inflict intense sanctions or whatever against Russia if they didn't do it, well, they didn't do it.

And you don't hear anything.

And Russia doesn't even get put on the freaking tariff list.

I mean,

I don't know if Donald Trump is necessarily truly in the tank of Russia, but I think he feels a kinship to Putin.

And I got to tell you, what was it?

What would he be doing differently?

What would he be doing differently if he wasn't?

I also don't believe it.

I also don't believe that it's actually like, because I think it's way stupider than that.

I think he's just a fucking moron.

But if he were a Russian asset in the White House, it's hard to think about something that he would have done differently the first seven years.

Oh, he'd be less obvious about it if he was an asset.

You know what I mean?

Like, he wouldn't be this blatant.

I think, you know, what was very revealing was in the Zelensky meeting when Trump went off onto how he and Putin together had to bear the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax.

Like, Putin didn't have to bear anything.

He loved it.

But that's what you start seeing is I think he feels a kinship with Putin and he's jealous of the fact that he has control of his country and Trump wants that.

And at least we're doing the intel sharing with Ukraine.

I think the aid has basically wound down, to be honest with you.

Ukraine can now produce 40% of its own weapons.

It's going to produce 4 million drones this year, which is amazing.

They did 1 million last year.

Europe is stepping up.

So Ukraine's not lost without the United States, but there's no doubt it's going to cost more Ukrainian lives than it should.

And I got to tell you, every day, I mean, It's not rare that I watch a video out of Ukraine and get pretty choked up watching this because it just reminds me of really honestly the World War II generation of Americans that just you know went to fight fascism and

you know it's it's I don't know it's inspiring to me but sad at the same time slava all right Adam Kinzinger have you said thank you yet I've had you on quite a few times have you said thank you I haven't heard of thank you thank you Tim thank you I so appreciate you you're so amazing you're my favorite you are very talented oh okay appreciate that all right that's Adam Kinzinger he used to be a congressman uh now he's got a sub stack go Go check it out, everybody else.

Have as good a weekend as you can.

Don't look at your Charles Schwab account.

We'll see you back here on Monday with Bill Crystal.

Peace.

Makes

me

cry,

watching the moon

on

the ocean

where California used to be

It's not half bad

Spend half your life

being sad

Don't be scared

Just chronically impaired.

Uh-oh.

Just take my hand.

Uh-oh.

Standing at the end of

the American

empire.

One

last

song

Here at the end

of

the moon

They seem

so

sure

At least that's the way

I

remember

the war

when New York used to be

It's not not that bad,

spend happy life

being sad.

Wow,

don't you weep

happy

fast asleep,

feeling uninspired

Unloaded standing at the end of the American

Empire.

And we thought

that it's time

to go.

Heard the news on the radio.

One last round

before

we go

through the pain,

atmospheric glow

and the hearts

came along.

Singing the song that we used to know.

One last round before

we go.

Let's ride before

we go.

So sad.

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

This is Larry Flick, owner of the floor store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

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