Bill Kristol: Authoritarian Takeover

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Up next, it's Monday.

So we got Bill Crystal.

Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

It is Monday, and even though he's on vacation, we've got editor-at-large Bill Crystal.

He could not stay away from you guys.

He is at the beach, and you might hear the,

what did Melania call it in the letter?

The melodious laughter of children

behind you as we talk.

How are you doing, Bill?

Thanks for working on the weekend.

I'm fine, Tim.

It's

good to be with you.

I gave up the newsletter for the week, but, you know, when Tim Miller calls, you can't say no.

You can't get rid of me.

Well, we've got, obviously, we'll spend most of the time on

what is happening with the Russia-Ukraine-Trump negotiations.

Zelensky appearing at the White House today.

And by the time this is out, that will be happening.

So always a reminder that if it's as crazy as it was last time, you can check out the Bulwark Takes feed for instant reactions.

But before we get to Ukraine, I want to talk about what's going on in D.C., especially, Bill, every once in a while you put something out there onto the internet on social media.

And I just...

I'm getting out of my chair, hooting and hollering because I agree so fervently.

And so I figure that's a nice place to start.

You posted this about the Democrats' response to what's happening in D.C.

I want to congratulate leading Democrats for their insistence on saying the takeover of D.C.

is a, quote, stunt or a, quote, distraction.

It's a rare trifecta of intellectual failure, political stupidity, and moral obtuseness.

And God, could I not agree more with this.

But talk about what you mean and what you're seeing from D.C.

I guess I saw a couple of Democrats, one of them, Senator Murphy, and it's a little unfair.

We should take maybe a sentence out of context.

Actually, your interview, very interesting, podcast Friday with Hakeem Jeffries.

And I don't want to criticize him by name since we shouldn't criticize someone who's kind enough to come on the podcast just a couple of days ago, but he was a little bit in the distraction camp.

I don't know.

Why do these politicians just feel the need to even explain that?

First of all, this isn't just not in a distraction, in my opinion.

It's kind of important.

And secondly, even if it were, just address the issue.

I always get so annoyed when politicians are like trying to explain to voters what they should care about or not care about, because you might think it's a big deal when we deploy federal troops to DC and have videos of them behaving very badly and so forth, and Trump's inventing justifications, which are open-ended for the future, et cetera, et cetera.

But you're wrong, because really what's important is the big bad bill, which doesn't go into effect for 18 months and, you know, which already has been

gotten quite a lot of publicity.

But the Democrats, that's their talking points.

They were sent on break with their talking points about Medicaid.

How can they be distracted by an actual federal takeover of our nation's capital?

So I was annoyed.

Yeah.

The federal takeover is bad on the merits as it it is.

And I want to talk about that in detail, including a video that we got from 14th Street that Sam Stein posted.

But just on the meta conversation here about how Democrats should talk about this and how anybody really that opposes this regime should talk about this, I've just become obsessed with this.

I'm going on a one-man crusade.

To borrow a phrase from Bill Simmons, please, Kitty, turn the TikTok camera on because I have a message for the Democrats.

Please stop calling things distractions and minimizing them.

I don't really know where this started, but it's everywhere.

It's endemic.

They say that militarizing the nation's capital is a distraction.

No, it is not.

It is the core of the fight we're up against.

They were saying the Putin summit is a distraction.

No, like the liberal world order and a free Ukrainian people hang in the balance.

This is not a distraction.

It is the fight.

And even things that are actual distractions, like the Sydney Sweeney ad or something, to talk about like them like that just makes you sound weird.

Just like use them as opportunities to reach people and project your values.

Saying that you just agree that Sidney Sweeney has good genes and think that the freaks that are trying to tear the country apart over this ad are the weird ones is a much better response than being like, this is a distraction and I want to care about Medicaid.

It's like, just talk like a normal fucking person, okay?

You can talk about Epstein and Medicaid and Ukraine.

Donald Trump is capable of doing this.

You don't see Donald Trump out there doing meta commentary about how the Democrats are trying to distract.

Like he just talks about everything.

He just throws shit against the wall.

That is what is happening.

So that is what Democrats should do.

They should fight them on everything.

They should create distractions of their own.

And if they're not going to at least do that, if they're not going to fight them on everything, at least fucking fight them when they're taking an interior police of mass thugs.

to harass your fellow citizens in the nation's capital in an attempt to seize power.

Like that is the time to fight.

That is not the distraction.

That is the fight that we have here.

Like in the so-called pro-democracy coalition, like they're doing an authoritarian takeover of the Capitol.

Like that is not the

fucking distraction from Epstein and Medicaid cuts.

Okay.

Like that is the fight.

So anyway, that's my rant about this.

Please tell your local Democratic politician.

Do you know

how this happened?

What was the genesis of this?

Where did this come from?

Yeah, it's a good, someone should go look up, you know, the uses of the word distraction, do a Google search or something.

But I agree with you totally.

The Democrats have become sort of a meta.

I like your formulation about the, this is a meta discussion, you know, what we should be talking about instead of just talking about whatever's in the news and whatever issues are presented to you.

But the Democrats have become kind of a meta party.

I wouldn't you say I found this in talking to Democratic donors over the last five, six months, endless discussion about what should we be talking about.

Should we be talking about this issue or that issue instead of just talking about the different issues, right?

The Republicans don't fall for this much.

They try a bunch of issues.

Some of them fade by, you know, go by the wayside because voters aren't interested or the issue resolves itself kind of, or they think it's a losing issue and they just kind of drop it.

But they do address, I mean, in their own crazy way and demagogic way, the issues, right?

And the Democrats think they can win by saying, well, that's not a real issue.

Because the real issue is X.

And say they changed the real issue.

When we started, when the Epstein thing began, and some of us, you and I, were saying that it's a very big issue.

It could be a very big issue and a legitimate issue.

That was the distraction.

I was lectured by, as you were too, right, by many leading Democrats.

Medicaid's the the story, the big bad bill.

We've got polls.

62% don't like the Medicaid.

And then, you know, it took like three weeks and a bunch of polls showing the public was quite interested in Epstein for the Democrats to decide Epstein's issue.

Then they decided DC is a distraction from Epstein, right?

It's like, you know, it's like everything's a distraction from everything else.

God forbid they should actually just address an issue, you know?

Yes.

And also, just on the Epstein thing, just as a specific example, it's actually just more effective to say, hey, Donald Trump is doing this takeover of DC while he's also engaged in a cover-up of documents that expose his relationship to people running a massive child sex ring, right?

Like he's covering up his relationship there, and I'm upset about that, and we should expose those documents.

That is a direct argument using the active voice

about how this is bad that he's doing this.

That's better to do than to try to be like, well,

what people really should be talking about is Epstein, to make it like a media critique or like a

pundit critique.

Just like fucking critique the president for for what he's doing, and you can critique him for two things at the same time.

This stuff doesn't matter that much, but it is just, it is annoying, and it contributes, I think, to the sense that the Democrats aren't like actually

really fighting this stuff.

That's more of an academic exercise than it is a campaign, you know, doing politics.

Kind of a cousin to what you're talking about, essay, is the Democrats.

felt need to do a lot of throat clearing on something before addressing the issue at hand.

So, well, well, we are concerned about crime, Tim.

And, you know, there's, there's too much of it.

And we don't want to look like the party that's soft on crime.

So we're now going to say again that we are really concerned about the crime, but it has been going down, though it's still too high.

Don't get me wrong.

I mean,

they can get to that if someone challenges them as not being tough on as being soft on crime, but maybe they should begin with the direct critique, not with the three minutes of self-flagellating and self-excusing before they get to discussing the actual issue at hand.

I'll follow my own advice here, and we'll get to the actual news now.

I needed to do a 10-minute session.

I'm imploring people to

stop with the fucking distractions.

And almost always, by the way, the distractions, this is my final point.

Now I'm doing a Sarah Longwell.

And another thing.

And also, almost always the thing that they say is a distraction is the thing that people actually want to talk about.

So maybe it's best to engage on the topics that people actually want to talk about instead of saying, like, you know, we really shouldn't talk about the things that people are naturally talking about and are interested in.

We should talk about this other thing instead.

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on the actual outrage that is the DC takeover.

Sam Stein posted on this, you know, on our sub stack on YouTube over the weekend.

There was a delivery driver on 14th Street.

It's about a block and a half from La Diplomat, where all the fancy Washingtonians like Bill Crystal have brunch.

So, you know, not exactly in the high crime neighborhood.

And the guy's taken down off of his moped.

He's tased.

There's just a pile on of masked, unidentified federal police, interior police, going after this guy.

They're so insane in the way that they treat him that one of them, one of the cops gets hurt.

Well, I don't know if they're cops, actually, one of the, whatever they are, gets injured by another one of the masked guys because they're all so rabid.

And the people around are shouting at them, like, who are you?

They won't say.

One of them shouts back, liberals have ruined the country, which is really great behavior that you want from your neutral federal law enforcement.

D.C.

police said it was not them.

The White House put out a statement this morning about it.

The moped driver was an illegal alien criminal from Venezuela with suspected gang affiliation and order of removal from the country.

Upon his arrest, the illegal alien criminal resisted and a law enforcement officer suffered a concussion.

She's like, they're just doing the same shit they did with the people they sent to El Salvador.

It's like, okay, maybe, I don't know, but could you just, you know, do normal police work and like tell us who you are and who that is and what they did.

And there's been some negative impacts on the D.C.

economy.

People, bars and restaurants empty this weekend.

People are saying people don't want to go out.

So I don't know.

Bill, do you have any additional thoughts about what we're seeing in D.C.?

Yeah, I think the negative impact of the D.C.

economy is probably a feature, not a bug, right?

They're not unhappy to have a blue city get a little bit of pain and suffering from

this effort.

No, it's really striking.

One other sort of example, again, or adjacent to what you're talking about is So governors of Republican states have been sending in a couple of hundred of their National Guard people to deal with this crime wave in D.C.

The states from which they're sending the National Guard, I think Ohio.

West Virginia.

Yeah, I think I noticed this, but Philip Bump actually did the research.

I just guessed it.

Of course, they have cities with higher crime rates than D.C.

And if they have such a problem with violent crime, I mean, they shouldn't probably do it either in their own state, because they should just fund their police departments better or have better law and order policies.

But anyway, they've got to...

you know, performatively send 200 National Guard to D.C.

to show they're on board with Trump's effort, which is just really brings home how much it's about Trump exerting federal power over the nation's capital city.

It's not about any empirical, you know, dealing with crime at all.

No, of course.

And where they are in the city, like the maps of where it shows that.

Andreger in the newsletter this morning makes a good point as well, which is like, to your point about this as being a feature, not a bug, like they want the violence.

They want the cop violence in the street.

Like the moped video they like, right?

Because that's what they're doing.

It's an intimidation tactic.

It's not a real law enforcement effort, right?

It's a marketing campaign and an authoritarian grab.

They sent a camera, I think, along with the 20, 15 or 20 federal agents they sent to arrest the sandwich guy at his

apartment building in northwest D.C.

after he had volunteered, I think, to come in.

And he wasn't resisting arrest.

They knew who he was.

And they wanted the video of all these

armed and beefed up federal agents

bravely assaulting this guy

in his ninth floor, one bedroom apartment, whatever, a few blocks from our office.

It's like low-level DOJ lawyer, you know, real, a real danger to society.

I'm meant to have a hoagie on hand today as like a

sign of resistance here as part of my as part of my set.

I need to look into that.

I know that there's a difference of opinions about Sandwich Man around the bowl.

I'm on the pro sandwich guy, yeah.

Subway needs to name a sandwich after him and so forth, you know, and

he's become a hero of the resistance.

Yeah, the sandwich resistance.

I mean, Patel, the FBI director, Cashfell, listed that as one of the felonies that they've arrested someone for in their grand list of 16 mostly ridiculous felony arrests they'd made

some night or two nights in D.C.

with a tiny, actually rather small number.

But then I think since some judges say that's ridiculous, it's not a felony to throw a sandwich at someone.

Yes, correct.

The judge did say that.

Yeah, the sandwich resistance.

I'm a part of it.

The last thing on this, and we'll get to a little bit at the end because I want to talk about midterms and potentially how this relates to that as well.

But just like, in addition to just the fact that what we're seeing in DC is un-American and wrong, right?

Again, masked, unnamed agents, you know, taking out people with no, no due process, no individual rights, doing it to intimidate people, now saying that they're going to continue this takeover conceivably, even after they have a legal rationale for it.

It's a model for what they want to do in other places, right?

And like, that is part of, that is how this relates to the big ugly bill or whatever, right?

Like they have the funding, you know, they're going to have additional funding for this.

They're looking for pretext to do it other places.

And if it's not fought back against aggressively in DC in the way that, you know, the deportation planes, Del Salvador or whatever, were fought back against.

So you can see like these people do fold, you know, if they see resistance.

And if they see that it's a political loser, they will not expand this to other cities and so it's important that it's made to be a political loser i think that's the other reason why the distraction thing frustrates me like it like it needs to be taken on now because they're they intend to expand their remit

i take your silence for concurrence okay great wonderful the children behind also agree cheering i can hear them cheering for me

totally with you the children are pro tim they're pro tim they're they're a pro sandwich guy too

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Let's go to the summit.

I want to go with what's happening today.

Second, let's just look look back.

You had Edelman on Sunday.

You know, I ripped off several rants on YouTube about what we saw in Alaska, but I haven't talked to you since it happened.

I don't think, no.

We talked right before.

We kind of talked in the middle.

We talked after the red carpet

had been rolled out for Putin and our soldiers were made to kneel at the base of Vladimir Putin's plane.

But I've not spoken to you since kind of the joint statement from Putin and Trump, which was very Russian and just the style of how it went.

Putin spoke first.

There were no questions taken.

It was all stuff that was very common for people who watch Russian quote-unquote press conferences, but it was very unlike traditional Trump press conferences and American press conferences.

And then in the ensuing period, we've seen a bunch of leaks about what was being discussed and about Trump's convos with our supposed allies afterwards.

So before we get into what's happening today, what were you and Eric's big takeaways looking back at Friday?

Eric was open to the proposition, as it was happening, that much as one disliked the optics and the red carpet and stuff, that maybe the thing was a nothing burger.

But I think he became much more convinced after following it closely, reading the Russian press, reading European reactions in particular, talking to people from Europe who had been briefed on what had happened, that it was actually bad.

I mean, that there really was a kind of Putin lectured Trump.

Trump didn't push back.

And I think you see that in Trump's comments since the summit, right, including the Hannity interview, which was just Friday night, but then subsequent truth social posts and so forth.

He's sort of on board the Putin agenda.

Best case was that he would just be, that it would be a failed summit and maybe that Trump would hold it a little bit against Putin.

I think it's the opposite.

You know, sort of a failed summit, Trump knows that.

And

he'll be annoyed at Zelensky today.

I worry.

I just think that's the fact, probably.

And he doesn't seem to be pressuring Putin in any way, right?

He gave up on the ceasefire.

He's given up on territorial integrity of Ukraine.

Not a word, God forbid, about the continued assaults on Ukrainian civilians, which have marked this past weekend.

They were sort of going on almost as the summit was happening.

So, yeah, I think it was a bad night in Alaska, and we'll see what happens today in the Oval Office.

Laying the groundwork for where we're at as it coming today, because it does.

I share Eric's kind of trajectory on that, where watching it live, it was like, okay, well, maybe this was just kind of one of those meetings that could have been an email type situations where like nothing really happens.

But, you know, as we learned what they kind of talked about in private, and then Trump's call to Zelensky and then now Trump's public statements afterwards with Hannity and then on social media, like you're seeing that he's basically reverted back to where he was, whenever that was a couple months ago, when they were berating Zelensky in the Oval.

And so just to kind of lay the groundwork for that,

the meeting that is today in the White House, Zelensky this time has learned that he needs some muscle.

He needs some heavies with him.

So Macrone, Starmer, Maris, Germany, Stubb from Finland, who I guess Trump likes for some reason, Maloney from Italy are all with him.

JD, on the other hand, will attend.

So we'll see if what Trump's heavy does.

It should be important to note that overnight, there's a Russian strike in Kharkiv, killing six, including two children, leaving 20 injured.

A lot of video from that going out.

So the Russians are not.

you know, slowing down their attacks on civilians at all.

And then I think most telling is this Trump bleat from yesterday ahead of the meeting.

President Zelensky of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.

Remember how it started.

No getting back, Obama given Crimea 12 years ago, and no, all caps, no going into NATO by Ukraine.

Some things never change.

So again, that posture is just basically, Zelensky, you need to

fold

and you need to wave the white flag and understand that you're not going to have a self-government going forward that can choose to align militarily with countries that you wish, that you think might support you.

And that's really where it comes down to.

But I think that's where we are this morning.

Yeah, I mean, Trump's no going to NATO undercuts.

What some people are taking a little hope from, Witkoff saying something about security guarantees, even like Article 5.

Well, that's literally what NATO is.

And Trump is basically ruling out any kind of serious security guarantee, let alone whether it would actually ever be enforced the way other ones that Putin has signed onto haven't been enforced.

So that part is very bad.

Yeah, let's just sit on that point for a second, because this struck me as well.

Marco was also doing the rounds this weekend where he was saying this.

Like he was like, look, there's going to be real security guarantees in writing, et cetera.

You can't square those two things, right?

Like there's no going into NATO by Ukraine, but there will be real security guarantees.

And like, the whole point of NATO is that it's a security guarantee.

How is the U.S.

going to provide a security guarantee to Ukraine without it looking like essentially something like Article 5, where if Russia attacks Ukraine, America will defend it?

Like, what's the difference?

Because that's the whole point of why he doesn't want Ukraine to be in NATO, because he doesn't want Ukraine to have security guarantees, right?

It doesn't make sense.

Yeah, we could have a bilateral security guarantee with Ukraine the way we do with Japan or something.

It depends true.

We can station troops there the way we do with Japan and South Korea.

I don't think Trump's really on board for that.

The Witkoff thing is so insane.

If we had an Article 5 relationship with Ukraine, we would be committed to fighting to help them defeat Russia, which I don't think Trump has, he won't even give them arms, let alone obviously talk about any kind of U.S.

involvement.

So, no, it's totally fake, I think, the security guarantee thing.

And that was sort of the talking point they used to try to pacify some critics like us, but I don't think it has lasted very long, obviously.

You know, on the Europeans, Eric's in touch with them.

He was ambassador to to Finland, he actually knows.

The Finns have done a current Finnish president, has done a very good job of sort of buttering up Trump, I think, in a hard-headed way, and in a way that's consistent with Finnish national interests and NATO's interests.

Is he the one that's been golfing with him?

I don't know.

He's a very good golfer.

Apparently, he was a varsity golfer at Clemson or something.

He went to college here.

Okay.

I don't know if it's Clemson, but something like that.

And so he's played golf several times with Trump, but I'm sure he lets Trump win.

Furman, important difference.

Furman.

Sorry, I don't know.

I don't want to have a fan of the South Carolinians watching here.

Yeah, how can I confuse those two?

Yeah, I probably lets Trump, you know, cheat and win a little bit and go off, and so he's done his duty.

I mean, it is amazing how far the Europeans have gone.

I've got to say it's obviously distasteful in a way, but I give them credit.

They're serious.

They don't want Ukraine to lose, and they're willing to swallow an awful lot of pride and dignity, you might almost say, in dealing with this.

clown we have as our president of the United States, unfortunately.

But I've gathered the Europeans, I don't know, Zelensky may have asked them to come, but I think a lot of them volunteered to come.

It is really astounding.

It's one thing to have one, you know, maybe von der Leiden, you know, the EU commissioner show up or one of them kind of come with an effective mandate from the others.

I should mention that she is also going, I didn't include her on the list, and Ruta of NATO.

No, but I mean, for Macron and Meritz and Starberry, I mean, it's like, you know, it's a NATO summit in effect in the Oval Office, which is a real attempt, which incidentally totally confirms your view in your excellent analyses that you did over the weekend, and then Eric Edelman's view that this was a very bad summit in Alaska.

They wouldn't be that alarmed if they hadn't gotten readouts that alarmed them.

They don't just hop on planes to come to the U.S.

for, if it's just, hey, meeting, let's have a fun meeting in the open.

It was just a nothing burger.

Right.

It was the initial thought.

And there would, you know, by definition, not be anything for them to jump to do.

Right.

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They've been really good.

Astonishingly good, to be honest.

Almost all of them.

I mean, I think Starmer's got some domestic issues maybe he should focus on, but like Macron, Meers,

even Maloney has been surprisingly good.

She was, we were very concerned that she was going to be more kind of in the urban camp and has not been from Italy.

So, I mean, it is, it's a little dispiriting.

to the fact that like as an American, as a patriotic American, the fact that we have the Europeans like flying here to beg our president to not be a surrender monkey.

I mean, it does, it hurts me as a, as someone born in the 80s, you know, who grew up believing that, you know, America as the leader of the free world was something that I had some pride in.

Clearly, not the leader of the free world anymore.

Eric and I were talking a little bit before the show, and you know, Eric was in the Foreign Service for three decades and very senior, obviously, ambassador, very senior positions, Under Secretary of Defense.

And he said, you know, one consistent theme was he was in, as he said, you know, hundreds, maybe thousands of meetings trying to push European allies to do more, to step up, to be a little tougher-minded, not to go, not to fall for some Russian propaganda stunt, you know, way back into the 80s with the deployment of the medium-range missiles and a million instances, obviously.

And even in my four years in government, obviously a lot of that.

And here we are, the opposite.

It's heartening that the Europeans have done this, but what has to root for the European, I don't know what to root for the Europeans against the American president exactly, but certainly the European leaders.

Yeah, the European leaders are much closer to the core

mission of defending liberty and helping our allies than the American president is.

But look, I hope they succeed, honestly, just for the sake of Ukraine, obviously for the world, and to stop Putin.

But

I don't know.

Trump's, I don't know, but we'll see.

I'm worried that Trump is, Trump is a little more dug in than, who knows?

Who knows?

Yeah, I mean, Trump is a coward.

It's important to remember that Trump's a coward that doesn't like to make big decisions like this.

Fundamentally, he wants everybody to like him.

Like that

trait,

the fact that Fred didn't hug him and tell him that he loved him as a child has been the thing that has saved us from the worst case outcome in a couple of different areas, I think, over this decade.

The hope, right, is that it's just this Trump is responsive to the last person that talks to him type thing.

And he was susceptible to Putin's flattery, and then now he'll be susceptible to whatever, Ruta calling him daddy again, and maybe that'll buy them a couple more months.

Like, that's a pretty sad place to be.

That's like the best case hope, right?

That that is what happens.

You buy more time.

Trump hears the other perspective is convinced that it's you know putin that's trying to snub him he doesn't want to seem like he's whatever getting pushed over and the thing that we've been worried about from the start is that eventually this thing comes to a head where trump really has convinced himself that it's up to zelensky to give up that that is the way for this to end and that if he refuses then he's not doing he's not whatever doing what trump wishes and then trump just takes his ball and goes home right it's just like good luck luck, you guys.

That's the negative scenario that who knows what comes out of today.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Or just that drifting on, doing nothing, but not providing serious assistance to Ukraine.

Also, ultimately, it's hard for Ukraine to sustain it.

But they have, I got to say, I think back in February, January, February, we were correctly very alarmed.

One piece of the alarm was that Ukraine couldn't sustain it without a fresh infusion of arms and support, even over the next, what was then the next, what, four or five months.

In that respect, Ukraine is doing better than we expected.

And Russia is probably weaker than we thought actually and which makes it all the more infuriating that trump is kind of propping up this dictator who's suffering terrible casualties has fought the war brutally but kind of idiotically actually and may be susceptible to actually it's real real pressure right but whatever whatever that's lindsey graham that sanctions bill 85 co-sponsors it's any moment any moment coming now you know i mean the degree to which these people who do know better leave aside rubio which is

but lindsey graham types they're not ever willing willing.

Are they ever going to

say?

Yeah, forget it.

Forget that I even began that question.

John Thune's planning on bringing that bill to the floor tomorrow.

He's got to wash his hair.

He's got a big week.

Maybe next week that bill will come to the floor.

We'll see.

I don't gain much hope.

Similarly, how it

feels silly at this point to even say when will the Republican Senator show spine?

It also feels silly to say this, but it's like

how we even got into this bizarro

world where the president of the United States, the vice president, and a huge swath of the the country just like accepts the insane perspective that Zelensky is, it's incumbent on Zelensky to be the one to end the war right now, or it's just where it's like, there actually is a person that can end the war, and it's Putin.

And like, that is the person that they refuse to put an iota of pressure on to try to do it.

And, you know, it's just this total, like kind of bizarro world assessment of what is happening that underscirds, you know, our entire idiotic strategic positioning when it comes to these negotiations.

So, anyway, we'll see what happens today.

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I want to talk to you about the mail-in ballot stuff.

Here's what Trump said this morning on Truth Social.

I'm going to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots and also while we're at it, highly, quote, inaccurate, very expensive, and seriously controversial voting machines.

With their horrible radical left policies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Democrats are virtually virtually unelectable without using completely disproven mail-in scam.

Elections can never be honest with mail-in ballots voting.

So,

this is to me is like extremely ominous.

Trump sends out a lot of crazy bleats.

Like, we don't analyze every single one of them, but I should just mention among the states with all mail-in voting, my hate, Colorado, California, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, a lot of these states are places where Democrats probably are looking to pick up seats, certainly in California and Colorado and Nevada, and depending on how things shake out in Utah with the potential court fights, maybe Utah.

So this is just straight back to Stop the Steel 2020 stuff, like laying the groundwork.

Like the writing is on the wall.

You do not need, this is not bluster.

You don't need to read through the lines.

He's just absolutely saying that he is starting to lay the groundwork for if the Democrats win the House next year, they will call it rigged and fight it and use every power they can to not seat people that come in in these states that have mail-in voting.

I don't think there's any other way to read this.

I'd go a little further.

I think there's laying the groundwork for acting in the summer or spring to stop states from actually using mail-in ballots, including not only all mail-in states, you all of mail states you mentioned, but here in Virginia, we have pretty generous early voting.

pretty easy mail-in, and then obviously same-day voting.

I've done all three in the last several cycles, depending on where I am on election day and the like.

Glenn Young won the governorship here in Virginia in 2021.

The Republican slate won all three statewide offices.

No one's ever said anything.

It's like zero problems.

I mean literally zero.

And Democrats have, however, gotten more used to mail-in voting and use them a little more.

So stopping it would presumably help Republicans.

I was struck, I think there's a draft executive order.

I have here the beach I haven't followed quite as closely, but I saw some texts about this executive order.

And one of the things he apparently says in passing, the states, the 50 states, are agents of the federal government somehow in this respect in conducting the elections.

That is really ominous.

That we have a very federalist election system.

Obviously, the way it's conducted in one state isn't the same as others.

Some are all mail-in, some are very restricted mail-in, and so forth.

Different voting hours, different this and that, some basic federal requirements, obviously, 18-year-old vote and non-discrimination and requirements and the like.

But he's laying the groundwork for a federal takeover of a lot of our elections or as much of it as they need to either distort the results, challenge the results afterwards and throw them out, as you say.

I mean, you could imagine the Republican House refusing to recognize certain results in certain states, as you were saying.

And then obviously for 2028, with a bigger runway to this, a huge attempt to put a major thumb on the scale of the actual conduct of the election, as well as the counting of the ballots.

So I think this is really, I need to study up more on this and maybe talk more about it next week.

I mean, we'll see exactly what he's ordering or not ordering.

And they're talking about even legislation that the compliant Republican Congress might pass next year.

Apparently, there's some internal debate.

One of the text chains I want said whether they can do this all by executive order, Mr.

President, Article 2, or they're going to try to get legislation to curb states' ability to shape their own election procedures within certain limits, obviously, which is the way it is now.

But I think, yeah, all in all, and then you put it together with DC, if I can loop back to that for a second, right?

Yeah, just before we go go back to DC, let me read, because here's what he said about the executive order, because I want to loop back to DC too.

We don't have the actual text yet, but here's what he wrote about it: an executive order to help bring honesty to the 2026 midterm elections.

Remember, the states are merely an agent for the federal government in counting and tabulating the votes.

They must do what the federal government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them for the good of our country to do.

Wow, that's even worse than I realized.

So that set off for what it's worth, huge alarm bells in this one text chain I'm on with very sophisticated election lawyer types.

They see where this is going.

And the term that seems a little innocuous, if you're a civilian agent of the federal government, what does that mean?

Is really a code for takeover.

And something that's not been considered to be the case, right?

There's been huge deference to the states.

Yeah, I don't remember Madison.

Is that in the Federalist Papers?

That the federal government,

that the states must do exactly what the federal government tells them for the good of the country?

I missed that.

Yeah, I mean, there are areas where the federal government obviously trumps the states, you know, interstate commerce and stuff, but that's why it sets off such alarms, because this would be turning the states into agents in this area in ways that has not been the case before and is very dangerous.

And it's not the federal government, what does he say?

As exemplified by me, the president of the United States or something?

Yeah, he's represented by the president.

Yeah, so the president just gets to decide how our elections were.

He doesn't like what's happening in Virginia.

There's too many mail ballots showing up.

He just avoids them, I suppose, right?

I mean, mean, I don't think that's incidentally,

that sounds alarmist and crazy.

I don't think that's at all beyond the pale.

I don't either.

Here's one of the points you made there, I just want to sit on for a second, because I think it's really right: is even if they fail on the maximalist version of this, right?

Like some federal takeover and who the hell knows.

I guess with the DC stuff, we'll get into what the net maximalist version of this might look like.

At the smaller level,

As you say, because of the disinformation that Trump and others have been putting out and the conspiracy theories, the type of voter that votes MAGA doesn't usually use the mail anymore, right?

Like they've bought into a lot of these conspiracy theories.

And so, you know, this is why on election nights, you see these things where you have these huge dumps one way or the other, because Republic, now, these days you didn't used to see, because Republicans vote in one manner, Democrats vote in another manner.

So

if you look to the midterms, it's not just in blue states that like Democrats are poised to pick up seats, right?

Like they are, you know, poised to, I think, potentially gain also in some of the red areas.

I mean, just like off the top of my head, like the Nebraska, John Bacon district with him retiring would be one example.

So now,

you know, in those states, you could, who knows, monkey with the rules.

You know, again, at the smallest level, you could just change the rules to make mail-in balloting harder, which makes it harder for Democrats to vote.

At maybe the next level up of nefariousness, it could just be an intense level to challenge mail-in ballots where those are, you know, so it's a close election, you know, those are looked at much more closely and thrown out on technicalities much more closely than ballots are.

You know, and then obviously there's even more chicandery than that they could get into.

To me, like that at this point is like the minimum that we can now expect to happen.

No, I think that's right.

And I think if you add to that the more sort of racially inflected ways in which they could also do things within states.

Philadelphia's got a particular problem with some of these mail-in ballots because, you know, we've seen in the past a higher rate of challenge.

Central Pennsylvania, fine, but super strict scrutiny in certain areas, right, which coincide with Democratic votes and minority population and stuff.

So I think the degree of

monkeying around that can happen once you open this door as widely as Trump wants to is

really alarming.

On the DC point, again, now as we get more towards the maximalist scary side of this, again, why this stuff has to be fought now, like this is another thing that is absolutely on their mind as far as something they're plotting, which is

if there are

protests about new election rules, you know, if during the early voting, you know, you remember this during 2020, where there'd be like a video of

them moving a box the wrong way.

And, you know,

some MAGA account would look at it and say, oh, this is evidence that they traded out one box or the other.

Like, you know, all this stuff starts to come out during early voting.

And they use these things as pretext and rationale to send in, you know, federal troops, National Guard troops to guard voting places, maybe particularly in blue areas to intimidate people, to prevent them from coming.

You know, there's just a whole range of potential threats on that vector as well.

And I think that the combination of DC and this executive order around mail-in balloting, it lays the groundwork for that pretty clearly.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And for real, I mean, really dangerous things.

I mean, the governor of of Virginia might say, we don't need any help in 2026 if it's Abigail Spanberger.

He even gets, you'll believe it's Glenn Young or whoever the Republican is, Sears.

Winsom Sears, I kind of think she'll go.

Yeah, but probably Spanberger.

But this is where the Ohio and other states, West Virginia and National Guard, showing up in D.C., I think it's a little unclear to whom they're reporting now, to their own governor or to the Defense Department.

You know, there's complicated issues of how the National Guard works.

But the idea that if Governor Spanberger says, we don't need to mobilize the Virginia National Guard, I'm not doing it.

And Trump says, well, actually, the West Virginia National Guard's volunteers to come in to help make sure that the elections in inner city Richmond are really legit.

You know, I mean, you could get, well, the showdowns between different states, but this is why I think it's interesting that they've clearly gone out of their way to encourage these Republican governors to send in a couple hundred, it's not really changing anything, you might say, National Guard from their states, but they want to establish that predicate that even if the governor is not friendly to them or the state legislature is not friendly to them, they can call on other states to provide for.

And they don't, in addition to what the forces they can unilaterally deploy, I suppose, you know, the federal forces, they can call on other states to help out, so to speak.

I meant to get to this during our Russia section.

The image of the day, I guess, we were talking about how dispiriting it was that we're just hoping for our European friends to save us and to give us backbone.

The other dispiriting image from this morning was: have you seen this?

The Russian tank that was moving into Ukraine in Zaporizhia.

Is that right?

Is that how you say that?

The Russian tank that was going to storm Ukrainian positions there in eastern Ukraine was waving two flags above it, a Russian and an American, side by side.

So it tells you what the Russians think about the state of play.

So I don't know.

Bill, I'll leave you with that image.

That's a horrifying note to leave on, but I'll go out to the beach and try to forget that blessed image.

That really is.

Turn off the phone.

Turn off the phone.

You don't need to watch the Oval Office today we'll give you the highlights and um we'll be back next week hopefully still aligned with the west and not with putin um we'll see how that turns out everybody else we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the bulwark podcast see y'all then peace

tonight?

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

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