Bill Kristol: The Lawless Administration

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Speaker 5 Hello, and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 5 As we are taping this right now, Donald Trump is about to give a press conference announcing some sort of federal takeover of Washington, D.C., more troops in D.C.

Speaker 5 as a response to big balls as as a like 20-year-old staffer or whatever for Doge getting beat up by street toughs. So we will have some thoughts on that.

Speaker 5 I'm going to save it to the end of the pod because I want to see if there's anything particularly outlandish that comes out of the White House today as we're talking about it.

Speaker 5 So in the meantime, it's Monday. So I'm here with the editor-at-large of Bulwark, Bill Crystal, getting to the other material.
How are you doing, Bill?

Speaker 6 Fine, Tim. How are you?

Speaker 5 I'm doing okay, all things considered.

Speaker 6 I know it's always a mistake to say, How are you? Because

Speaker 6 I'm okay, but the country is not great.

Speaker 6 Did I say this to Renegg? You once said, that's my standard answer. Like everyone says, well, I'm fine.
Family's fine, you know, luckily. And thank God and all that.

Speaker 6 But someone chastised me, kind of earnest, progressive type, when I said, I'm fine, things are fine. You can't be fine, Bill.

Speaker 6 I mean, when the country's in this kind of shape, really, you can't, even you can't personally be fine. You can't make that distinction anymore.

Speaker 6 And I think we should try to make the distinction, don't you think?

Speaker 5 We had the red dress run in New Orleans this weekend. So I put on a red dress and pranced around the French quarter.

Speaker 5 How can you not be fine as a man in a dress in the French quarter, 88 degrees outside working on a suntan? It was okay.

Speaker 6 I think if you were to discuss that for five, ten minutes, people would be very interested in more of a detailed account of that. We don't have that in McLean, I don't think, you know.

Speaker 5 You don't have a red dress around in McLean? You probably should think about the types of folks you get out there. Dick Cheney in a dress.
You know, you get a lot of whatever, Boeing contractors

Speaker 5 out there.

Speaker 5 I don't know. Anyway, okay, let's move on.

Speaker 5 Apparently, we're going to have a bilateral meeting between our president president and Vladimir Putin, maybe not a necessary distinction there, in Alaska on Friday.

Speaker 5 They announced that over the weekend. There's currently no plans for Vladimir Zelensky to be included in this, though there's some kind of discussion.

Speaker 5 Maybe Zelensky gets invited, but is in a different room.

Speaker 5 I don't know how they're going to work all that out. Kathy Young wrote for the bulwark this morning about how that's essentially these two guys meeting about how to carve up Ukraine.

Speaker 5 Zelensky put out a statement basically saying that the Ukraine constitution requires a vote on ceding any land and that he was not

Speaker 5 going to have to abide by whatever these two guys come up with. So I've got a bunch on this, but what's your sort of top line on what we're hearing and what we might expect this week?

Speaker 6 I mean, Kathy Young's piece is really excellent. People should read that for a more detailed account with interesting quotes from Russians, actually, and Ukrainians.

Speaker 6 So, A, getting a one-on-one meeting with Trump is a victory for Putin.

Speaker 6 I mean, the line until Trump took over was no deals about Ukraine without Ukraine being involved, which is generally a good policy when you're standing with a democratic ally.

Speaker 6 This is, you know, that was the problem, the famous problem of Munich, right? Czechoslovakia. They were not engaged in the carving up of their nation.
So it has Munich overtones.

Speaker 6 Also, having it in the U.S., I mean, Alaska is part of the U.S.

Speaker 6 is amazing, actually.

Speaker 5 Is Alaska part of the US? Alaska is part of the U.S.

Speaker 6 Leaving Side of the oddity of the Alaska side of it. And I suppose that's just because anywhere you came in the continental U.S., there would be massive protests and stuff as they should be.

Speaker 5 Or maybe you want to make it convenient for him. You know, he didn't want to be on the plane for a couple extra hours.

Speaker 6 I guess that's what he wanted. And he can look at it.
He can think about whether he wants to take it back at some point.

Speaker 6 But Trump could give it

Speaker 6 some

Speaker 6 funny crack that Putin will offer to Trump to trade Alaska back to Russia, and in return, Putin will give us Greenland.

Speaker 6 Trump might go for that. Witkoff would have gone for that.
He seems like such an idiot. But, you know, he is a war criminal.

Speaker 6 I mean, he hasn't gone to any European country except for like, I think, very friendly ones like Hungary

Speaker 6 since the war began. He certainly hasn't been here or met with a U.S.
president. Having him come to the U.S.
and be treated as an

Speaker 6 equal head of state is a big victory, I think, psychologically for Putin and I.

Speaker 6 I think it's going to damage our attempts to hold, well, we're not even trying to hold the anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine coalition together.

Speaker 6 It's going to damage others' attempts to hold that coalition together.

Speaker 5 You mentioned Witkoff being an idiot. I want to get to Witkoff in a second, but

Speaker 5 we have other morons that are involved in this. Did you catch our NATO ambassador, Matt Whitaker?

Speaker 5 I think we're unclear whether he had a passport before he came to ambassador to NATO, but I just want to play what he said about what the contours of the negotiation would be on CNN this weekend.

Speaker 5 Certainly, I think, you know, I took Zelensky's comments at face value, which is that no big chunks or, you know,

Speaker 5 sections are going to be just given that haven't been fought for or earned on the battlefield.

Speaker 5 Earned on the battlefield. You know, I mean, this guy isn't going to really be involved in the negotiations probably.
So it's one level, it's like, who cares?

Speaker 5 But on the other level, it's like, that's the U.S. ambassador to NATO talking about Russia earning

Speaker 5 territory on the battlefield thanks to their unlawful invasion of their neighbor. And

Speaker 5 that's insane.

Speaker 6 And to the brutality of their invasion and aggression. Yeah.
So when they invade Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, I suppose he's going to say that, well, you know, they earned it on the battlefield.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's so grotesque, right? It's a phrase that I think one would have used in the past in phrasing U.S. troops or Allied troops of their courage.
You know, they earned this.

Speaker 6 And to use it about this invasion is, but, you know, that's really unbelievable. I mean, it would have been good in World War II, too.

Speaker 6 You know, it's sort of, well, the Nazis earned France on the battlefield. So who are we to step in here? You know, I mean.

Speaker 5 Back to Wickoff.

Speaker 5 So, yes, Witkoff is negotiating. He's over there.
Real estate guy, you know, a lot of deep knowledge of Russian history. After the meeting, Trump said that he's very proud of Steve.

Speaker 5 He had very productive meetings. The Russians were delighted that Witkoff ate a big meat pie over there, kind of a traditional Russian meat pie.
He brought back an award for a U.S.

Speaker 5 CIA agent whose son, Michael Gloss, died fighting for Russia.

Speaker 5 Michael Gloss's dad, Larry, had said that his biggest fear was that someone in Russia would put two and two together and figure out who his mother was and use him as a prop.

Speaker 5 He has mental health issues, et cetera. So Putin, like trolling Witkoff, Witkov, to Witkov doesn't realize it, I guess, brings back like a medal for this guy's mother.

Speaker 5 He also confused the specifics of the deal, first saying that Russia would withdraw from some of the southern regions, then backtracking.

Speaker 5 And then our European allies made him do a clarifying call over the weekend about what is true. And he said the only thing actually on the table is Ukraine withdrawing from Donetsk.

Speaker 5 So that's not really encouraging, I mean, about where we're at going into Friday.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's unbelievable. This guy representing the United States States of America goes into a meeting with Putin with

Speaker 6 no one with him, right? No, no U.S. translator.
The one translator is a Russian translator. He doesn't know Russian.
No ambassador, not our ambassador,

Speaker 6 not a foreign service person, not an assistant secretary of state, not anyone who could help him understand what Putin was saying and what it implied and which places which in Ukraine and so forth.

Speaker 6 So yeah, it's both buffoonish and horrifying, you know, in a sense, right?

Speaker 5 Yeah, it is buffoonish and horrifying. And I guess it's also just like,

Speaker 5 you know, Putin, again, has done this so many times. Like, Putin could do English, you know, at least some basic levels of English.

Speaker 5 And Zelensky, when Zelensky meets in America and speaks in English, but like, he likes the control, you know, that comes from, hey, we're going to speak in Russian and there's going to be some gray area.

Speaker 5 It's why like his comments always, you know, they begin with like oftentimes like long lists of complaints about things that have happened in the past, like before he gets to the thing.

Speaker 5 And so I guess my point is it wasn't an accident that Witkoff like misunderstood what they had agreed to, right? Like he didn't have any Russian experts with him.

Speaker 5 Putin likes for things to be gray to maximize, you know, his negotiating power. Witkov came out of there thinking he had a better deal than he did.

Speaker 5 Him being confused.

Speaker 5 contributed to the fact that this meeting is happening on Friday. And now they're already backing off what Russia's obligations are going to to be.

Speaker 5 I just think that that's pretty telling.

Speaker 5 There are obviously some people out there that have some more bullish views about

Speaker 5 what might happen on Friday, but I think that augurs pretty poorly.

Speaker 6 I mean, I just hope it's fiasco and falls apart as opposed to Trump actually agreeing to something and then trying to impose it on Zelensky and causing a crisis with our European allies and doing even more damage.

Speaker 6 But we discussed this, I think, a week or two ago, didn't we? With Trump and foreign policy, you have to root for kind of

Speaker 6 you know, sort of chaos and incompetence preventing him from doing too much damage to the country.

Speaker 5 Point of personal privilege. One last thing.
I read Lisa Murkowski's statement on this. She's just getting on my nerves these days.
She writes, do you have to do this?

Speaker 5 I guess is my question as the Alaska senator. She writes, this is another opportunity for the Arctic to serve as a venue that brings together world leaders to forge meaningful agreements.

Speaker 5 She kind of goes on to talk about how she has some doubts about Putin, but how she's still happy this is going to happen in Alaska. It's just like, I don't know.
It feels like this is just,

Speaker 5 she's unfrozen caveman a little bit from a different time where you feel like the senator has to put out a statement such as this.

Speaker 5 I don't think that there's really much, much reason for Lisa Murkowski to expect that

Speaker 5 this will be

Speaker 5 a lasting deal that

Speaker 5 historians look back on.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you're right. It's sort of like the old school, you know, it's in my state, so I'm going to welcome the foreign leader, but this is a war criminal.

Speaker 6 This is not, you know, a a nice NATO summit that they're having up in Anchorage or wherever they're having it in Alaska.

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Speaker 5 We had some actual news on the Epstein front. Just this morning, a U.S.
judge denied the Justice Department's bid to unseal the Maxwell grand jury records.

Speaker 5 Kind of an interesting sub-bullet to that was in that decision. The judge said that he personally reviewed the grand jury material and said there's virtually nothing in it that isn't public already.

Speaker 5 It would, quote, not reveal new information of any consequence. A couple different ways you could look at that, but Bill, I wonder what you made of that.

Speaker 6 Well, this was mildly clever of the Trump people to make this the kind of transparency that they'd been promising, the revealing of records, you know, the one thing that wouldn't reveal anything and that you have to go to a judge to reveal.

Speaker 6 And there's such a strong precedent, I gather, against revealing these records that the judge found that there was no need to. So it doesn't speak at all to what's in the Epstein files, obviously.

Speaker 5 And there are some folks that thought that was like the gambit

Speaker 5 initially, right? It was like, okay, well, and maybe the judge will

Speaker 5 overrule it.

Speaker 5 I didn't know what would be in the Maxwell grand jury.

Speaker 5 I did think that it was something to protect from Trump, you know, because there's no reason to think that Trump would have been in those grand jury documents. Right.

Speaker 5 Whereas obviously he's in some of the other material. Though, you know, who knew whether there would be other info of interest, right?

Speaker 5 And I guess the more clever thing for them to do would be to put out a grand jury document that would have implicated Democrats or something, right?

Speaker 6 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But I think, I mean, just on the grand jury thing, I mean, they purposely, and this is what prosecutors do, right?

Speaker 6 As I understand it, indicted Maswell, I think, for three or four, you know, a handful of crimes that they had very good evidence on. They had victims willing to testify.

Speaker 6 Obviously, that's not the case in every instance. When you go to the grand jury, you don't mess around with the other 997 cases that show what a monster she was.

Speaker 6 You go with a very detailed, I gather, testimony to say she committed this crime at this date in this place. And here's the witness testimony and so forth.

Speaker 6 So, yeah, I think this was a fake from the beginning by Trump. And people, but I don't think it'll work very well, do you think? I mean, it's not.

Speaker 5 No, no, no. In the tabloid segment of the pod, we also, the Daily Mail, had a report over the weekend.

Speaker 5 It said they had interviewed Jolene's old cellmate who said that she heard Jolene tell another inmate that she had dirt on Trump and that she thought that because she had dirt on Trump, that was going to be leveraged over the Biden administration.

Speaker 5 This was years ago. Well, maybe Biden would pardon her in exchange for the dirt.
Who the hell knows if this is true or not, but it's interesting.

Speaker 5 It shows the mindset of Maxwell, the prisoner, also, right? Regardless of what the truth is about what she has or doesn't have on Trump.

Speaker 5 And who knows if they even got to the Biden administration on that sort of idea. But the plan is working for her so far with Trump.

Speaker 5 I mean, she's manipulating the Trump administration into getting her into the lowest security prison possible.

Speaker 6 And she knew Trump, I mean, pretty well. So she knows what makes Trump tick.

Speaker 6 And she knew that having the, I mean, everyone says that once Trump took over, the Maxwell team was very encouraged, hopeful, and they did find the occasion to play the cards they have.

Speaker 6 And now she's in this club-fed-type prison. And that may not be the end of it, of course.
We'll see what else she gets out of Trump.

Speaker 5 You focused on the J.D. Vance angle in the newsletter.

Speaker 5 I want to hear more from your theories. At first, J.D.
was on

Speaker 5 with Maria Bartaromo.

Speaker 5 I kind of wonder, why do these people all go on Maria Bartiromo shows? I feel like I'm playing quotes from the Maria Bartaromo show more than anything these days.

Speaker 5 I guess she's the Tim Russert of Trump 2.0 because I think they all think it's going to be,

Speaker 5 because she just is, you know, like a pro-Trump propagandist. But like, she asked us to ask the questions about what is in the news, at least.

Speaker 5 And it oftentimes creates some unhelpful quotes from the administration. But anyway, here's J.D.
Vance this weekend going on Maria's low-rated Sunday morning show.

Speaker 14 We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires. And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this.

Speaker 14 And yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.

Speaker 5 I think you kind of had the maximalist view on what J.D. Vance might possibly be plotting here.
A smaller view of it for what I would look at would be,

Speaker 5 okay, I mean, it certainly doesn't help. the administration's efforts to get off of the story to say, hey, there's a bunch of interesting stuff around Democrats.

Speaker 5 It's like, okay, well, if that's true, let's see.

Speaker 6 Right? No, for me, that's what's so decisive.

Speaker 6 Now, that could be a blunder, just just Vance being, you know, having his previous talking points about we want to see all this stuff or being embarrassed to change from that too much.

Speaker 6 So he repeats it, but focuses on Democrats. But the obvious follow-up is, okay, fine.
Let's see all of it. Democrats, but hey, isn't Trump in those files? I seem to remember reading about that.

Speaker 6 There was some Oval Office meeting where they discovered that, indeed, didn't. hundreds of FBI agents black out Trump's name many times from these files.
Could we see those too?

Speaker 6 I mean, I think he's inviting that. My morning newsletter sort of gives a more, you know, Machiavellian interpretation that Vance is happy to be sort of throwing Trump implicitly under the bus.

Speaker 6 It is striking, incidentally, he doesn't defend Trump. He doesn't say, you know, I know this man, he did nothing wrong or anything like that, right? There's zero defense of Trump.

Speaker 6 There's just this analysis sort of of the Biden should have done more. Incidentally, Trump believes and demands full transparency.
That also invites, okay, well, he's the president. You know,

Speaker 6 it's not like some congressman demanding full transparency. If Trump wants full transparency, he can make the files transparently available.

Speaker 5 Did you see this JD story from last week about how the Ohio River was too low and he wanted to take the family kayaking?

Speaker 5 And so they like pumped additional water into it so that him and his family and his security detail could get onto the river. I bring this up only just because

Speaker 5 it's unclear what JD is doing.

Speaker 5 His main job is to be the, it looks feels like the rapid response man for the administration. He doesn't have a portfolio and he's been going on a lot of vacations.

Speaker 5 And it's like, I don't know, from putting on your chief of staff for Dan Quayle hat, it feels like in the olden times, that would have been a story that would have waylaid you guys for like a month, right?

Speaker 5 If you're like, hey, Dan's going back to Arizona and we're going to use federal resources to, you know, pump water into the river that he wanted to go on to, right?

Speaker 5 I mean, it is, it's one of those things, like that would have been a big story, I think, in a different time.

Speaker 6 And I guess the Vance staff excuse was, well, the Secret Service told us the river was kind of unsafe unless you pump more water into it. I have no idea if that's true or not.
I don't know.

Speaker 6 Maybe other people were rafting unsafely in the river then.

Speaker 6 But you know what?

Speaker 6 If I believe when I was chief of staff, the vice president, if the secret service had said we shouldn't go there was the vice president, it's risky unless we were to pump huge amounts of water into this river, use the Corps of Engineers, or whoever does that.

Speaker 6 I think we would have said, you know what, we'll just skip the, we'll skip the river.

Speaker 5 Yeah, we'll go to the batting cages. I'll take the kids with the batting cages.
Exactly, maybe. We'll do putt-putt.
I thought maybe putt-putt today would be a good idea.

Speaker 6 Something to think about. I think my interpretation is a little troublemaking and extreme in the sense of I interpret both the meeting last week and its leaking.

Speaker 6 Vance was strangely going to host at the vice president's residence, which then strangely leaked and got the Epstein thing back on the front pages for a day or two.

Speaker 6 And now this, his comments yesterday, I interpret them as sort of Machiavellian. And Vance would not be unhappy if Trump is damaged by the Epstein scandal.

Speaker 6 If you think Vance is worried that Trump will run again in 2028, which he should be, and if he thinks otherwise, if Trump doesn't run, he has a good chance to take over.

Speaker 6 Maybe even before then, who knows? But I would say it's conspicuous how little Vance defends Trump. You know, he sort of has his own agenda.

Speaker 6 On Ukraine, for example, he had his own anti-Ukraine statements yesterday, which were his typical, you know, callous and sort of stupid, you know, kind of, oh, we're tired of that war and something.

Speaker 6 But I don't think there was a whole lot of the traditional vice presidential, you know what?

Speaker 6 President Trump is going to is a great negotiator and he's going to be able to, and there was not the usual phrase, you know, of his boss. I wonder what the real Vance-Trump relationship is, actually.

Speaker 5 Is it possible they could have a real relationship? You know what I mean? No. You mentioned the 2028 thing.
Did you see? I'm going from memory.

Speaker 5 So I think it was the Iser Bajan leader that was in when they were kind of joking about the Trump 2028 thing. Like he's doing this thing now where it's like a lot of people want it, right?

Speaker 5 But we can't do it. You can't do it here.
But maybe, but could you? You know what I mean? He's kind of, he's doing that where he is not, he's not doing, we're having people looking into it, right?

Speaker 5 Like he's not doing that, right? But

Speaker 5 he continues to tease.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, I'd say, I think maybe it's like they tell me you can't do it. He is shoving that door open gradually and leaving it open somewhat.

Speaker 6 He's not gone quite as far as you say of commissioning someone to do a study that proves he's able to do it.

Speaker 6 We're probably a year away from that or an official Justice Department memo saying they've re-looked, they've looked again at the Constitution and it's fine.

Speaker 6 But I think he's clearly, I mean, he clearly wants to. I guess he said that himself, didn't he? I'd like to.
And he's clearly beginning to nudge everyone towards normalizing it.

Speaker 5 Aaron Powell, Jr.: One other thing on the Epstein thing, because I do want to present the other side of this from a political standpoint.

Speaker 5 Harry Enton was posting this, I believe, this morning, just kind of looking at the numbers. There were some CNN polls looking at the Epstein numbers.

Speaker 5 And, you know, essentially search traffic, I guess, on Epstein is down. It got really spiked for whatever the week when this was really hot.
Trump's approval rating is not good, but it's...

Speaker 5 static and it is better than it was in the first term. I kind of forgot, Sarah and I talked about this on the next level last week.

Speaker 5 I kind of forgot how bad Trump's approval was already by summer of 2017. Like there was just a very immediate regret, I guess, or whatever, among the electorate back then.

Speaker 5 We haven't seen it quite as dramatically this time. Harry also says less than 1% of people say it's a nation's top issue.
Obviously, I think that's not really surprising. I don't know.

Speaker 5 I kind of see both sides of this. I think it's worth at least, you know, just sort of talking out.

Speaker 5 Like, is there a chance this is kind of like an August shark attack story that comes and goes, it doesn't end up doing damage to him, do you think?

Speaker 6 There's a chance. I mean, I saw what Enton said, and he's got this Google search number dramatically down.
But of course, it can go back up. I mean, I feel like

Speaker 6 I'm older than you and Harry Anton. You know, there were many weeks, months from 19 mid-73 to mid-74 where people thought Nixon's going to get out of Watergate.

Speaker 6 I don't, it's not saying this is Watergate, but people have it. It's so simple-minded to say it's gone.
It's over. You know,

Speaker 6 Google searches are down this week.

Speaker 6 I mean, let's see where they are when they come back and when Congress has to decide whether when they start, the Democrats start forcing votes on releasing the Epstein files.

Speaker 6 Plus, what else are we going to find about the files? Plus, what's going to happen with Maxwell?

Speaker 6 And again, Vance has, in that respect, helped to keep the door open to, well, what developments are next. So I think it's, and it's just being short-sighted, honestly.

Speaker 6 In terms of Trump's overall approval, I don't think anyone's ever thought that Epstein by itself is going to move big swaths of voters from Trump. Does it create doubts?

Speaker 6 Does it create problems, though, down the road? There, I think, to fit into a a broader narrative that weakens him. Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 5 My view is always, and I saw some chat on this, you know, because it's hard to kind of get into the nuance and all this.

Speaker 5 And I like there were some folks, a feedback we got, I got some listeners who are like, I don't know, I had a minute where I thought this was gonna be the thing that took him down, and now I don't know anymore.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, I never thought that was gonna take him down.

Speaker 5 Like, the thing I felt like I kept trying to say over and over again, which I still believe now, is that I do think it's like a little bit of a breach of trust with a core demo, which is manosphere types and some of the craziest like QAnon, Tucker, whatever, Alex Jones types, that it might be a hard breach of trust to repair.

Speaker 5 And that like it's less of a, oh, this is going to be Watergate and end his presidency and more of like, you know, it will be kind of something that will stand as a shorthand

Speaker 5 for

Speaker 5 how kind of the coalition started to fray. I maintain that that is still true.
And I maintain that the Democrats can use it to effect in that regard.

Speaker 5 And And just like going back, I mean, it was like, did Benghazi take Hillary down? No. Did more than 1% of the public say that Benghazi was the most important issue facing the country? No.

Speaker 5 Did it end up hurting her? Like, yeah, it did. It did end up hurting her.

Speaker 6 Didn't it create the email story? I mean, isn't that kind of

Speaker 6 testimony in Benghazi? No, I think you're absolutely taking it down. I'm probably a little guilty of this because of using the Watergate analogy occasionally, is ridiculous.

Speaker 6 And Trump is never going to resign the presidency, I would guess. And the Republican Party is never going to turn on him.

Speaker 6 And we're not going to have justice Department's never going to prosecute his subordinates, all of which happened, obviously, in Watergate.

Speaker 6 So it's not going to, he's not going to leave office because of this.

Speaker 6 Unfortunately, very, very unlikely that that's the case. But yeah, I agree.
It contributes to the weakening of him. And

Speaker 6 yeah, people are being silly, I think, to write it off. It's only been, when did July 6th? I mean, let's be a little put things in perspective.

Speaker 6 July 6th is when he issued that, when the Patel-Bondi memo came out. It's only a month, well, five, six weeks away, right?

Speaker 6 I mean, it's done quite a lot of, I don't know, it seems like it's preoccupied the administration, caused a lot of trouble, caused heartburn for Republican members of Congress quite a lot in these five or six weeks.

Speaker 6 And as I say, I think here advance is helpful. It just, it's not going away.

Speaker 6 The door, you can imagine it going away at some point, but for now, they haven't succeeded in closing the door on the story.

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Speaker 5 All right, so back to the news of today. You know, some of the stuff is kind of happening as we talk.
So if any other developments happen, we'll get to it.

Speaker 5 But Trump at the podium just about 30 minutes ago said this is Liberation Day in D.C. We have another Liberation Day, a second Liberation Day.
This is Liberation Day in D.C.

Speaker 5 We're going to take our capital back. I'm invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act and placing the D.C.
Metro Police. department under direct federal control.

Speaker 5 He goes on and he says this will go further. We're starting very strongly in DC and we're going to clean it up real quick, possibly implying that the military and other places.

Speaker 5 He says that they have mobilized the National Guard in D.C., and they'll bring in the military if needed. They'll be strong.
They'll be tough.

Speaker 5 Militarization of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I don't even know, honestly. That's a little more than people expected, the actual federal direction,

Speaker 6 not just supervision, but I mean, takeover, I guess, of D.C. police.
I'm not sure who they report to and how that works in practice.

Speaker 6 I mean, they do have a pretty big police department with a police chief and reports to the mayor. So that'll be...

Speaker 6 But no, this is an excuse just like L.A. was, right? He's testing the proposition.

Speaker 6 And centerly, I think it's interesting what you say about Trump's own statement, which he depends on the peculiarity of D.C. and home rule.

Speaker 6 It's not like every other city, which is in a state, you know, and therefore doesn't have the direct relationship that Trump has to the National Guard here and doesn't have a home rule legislation that Congress passed.

Speaker 6 So he's taking advantage of the peculiar historical status of D.C., but He's also speaking about it in a way that would not stop with D.C.

Speaker 6 And if some other place has a terribly high crime rate, just like like with L.A., right? Remember the statement saying he was going to use the guard and then the Marines in L.A.

Speaker 6 was clearly not limited to L.A.

Speaker 6 So these are both canaries in the coal mine for using the military and for federalizing law enforcement in ways that they could be used to curtail civil liberties and to take over.

Speaker 6 conceivably parts of governance in blue cities and in other states,

Speaker 6 not just in D.C.

Speaker 6 And I think it's very ominous with 2026 and 2028.

Speaker 6 I mean, I just think, you know, all you need is some disturbance somewhere in a Democratic area, maybe a minority area of a big city and a contested state, you know, and suddenly, hey, you know, got to help out there.

Speaker 6 Can't have this kind of violence. Someone got, you know, was carjacked in Philadelphia.
I don't need to minimize some of the crimes, but crime is down in D.C., incidentally.

Speaker 6 You know, it went spiked in 20 to 22. It's got down quite a lot, actually, in the last two years.
And

Speaker 6 it's grotesque. You see that footage of

Speaker 6 these people, masses, apparently of federal, I don't know what they were exactly who they were, around

Speaker 6 Union Station last night. A place you and I have been many, many, many, many times.

Speaker 5 And then walking around the National Mall today. And it's like, so it looks like Pam Bondi looks like the Metropolitan Police Department is going to report to Pam Bondi.

Speaker 5 She doesn't have anything else to do. Yeah.
And on the mall, and some of this stuff, and this is so preposterous, and it's kind of an insult to some of these guys.

Speaker 5 Like they're, they're literally mall cops now. They're going to walk around the Lincoln Memorial, which is already heavily police.
There are a lot of people there.

Speaker 5 So, I just will say, I apologize if there was another impetus for this that I missed.

Speaker 5 But, like, one of the impetus for this, actually, today, was what happened last Sunday to the Doge kid at Corsetine Big Balls, as they called him. Just like, so folks understand what happened.

Speaker 5 It was 3 a.m., so Saturday night into Sunday morning. So, the guy was out at the bar.
Nothing wrong with that. It was with a girl.

Speaker 5 They were walking on 14th and Swan Streets, like basically right by Logan Circle. Huge 14th Street is where people go out and party in D.C.
It is well policed.

Speaker 5 Police say a group of teens approach the two of them. Corsetine pushes the woman into the car.
He gets beat up.

Speaker 5 I don't know if they stole anything or whatever. He gets beat up and nearby officers step in.
Suspects flee.

Speaker 5 And then two 15-year-olds from Hyattsville end up being arrested and charged with carjacking later.

Speaker 5 It's not good that this happened to him. It's bad that this happened to him, but this story does not call for military intervention.

Speaker 5 Like he was in a heavily policed area, something bad happened, the police showed up, right? Like, and so it's good that these 15-year-olds are getting arrested.

Speaker 5 If the idea is that the carjacking DC does have a lot of minors that are doing it, is there a program? Is there, is there, like, have we been too lenient on minors?

Speaker 5 Should there be some other kind of deterrence to deter, you know, so under 18-year-olds who are doing carjackings, you know, aren't as likely to do it. Like, sure.

Speaker 5 Like in New Orleans, I went through a spat of carjackings a couple of years ago, changed the rules, changed the policies. Like carjacking isn't really a problem in New Orleans anymore.

Speaker 5 And it's not that it doesn't happen, but like it's not, it was a spike and then it's, it's been reduced. Like there are like law enforcement solutions to this problem.

Speaker 5 And to me, like the takeaway from this is like they're just looking for a pretense to do this anywhere. And that is like the real worrying thing.

Speaker 6 Totally. I couldn't agree more.
Incidentally, it's not clear that the FBI and certainly not the National Guard, they're not trained to do street-level policing.

Speaker 6 I mean, and Bondi's not trained, has no background in actually supervising that.

Speaker 6 And I don't know if anyone in the Justice Department, I mean, it's pretty different, the Federal Justice Department, from actual Metropolitan Police Force.

Speaker 6 It's quite complicated knowing how to, you know, how to do these things, how you arrest people, how you read them their rights, how you defuse situations on streets.

Speaker 6 A bunch of National Guard people, I mean, I have friends in the National Guard. They admire the fact that they're serving the country.
They're not trained for this.

Speaker 6 And I guess they can give them a 48-hour course and then, what, send them out to Logan Circle on a Saturday night? That is really asking for trouble, I think.

Speaker 5 Throw out the federal government's already already runs DC parks, a lot of the federal parks where there has been like some disorder and some crime.

Speaker 6 But that's an actual park police who, I mean, presumably are trained as police.

Speaker 5 Yeah, true, no, for sure. Yeah.
No, my point is like, that would have maybe been a good place to start, right?

Speaker 5 If you're serious about this, like, how about like more funding for the police that are already in charge of what's the Meridian Hill Park there, you know, which is not far from where Big Big Balls was.

Speaker 5 Like that, like that would be a thing to do. They're not doing that.
Like they're underfunding all of that. And, you know, the whole thing is just, it's a power grab.
And the L.A.

Speaker 5 thing, it is, like, it remains crazy that, like,

Speaker 5 this stuff doesn't get unraveled once it starts. You know? I mean, there's no reason for any of this happening in L.A.
now, and it continues.

Speaker 6 Trump's explicit justification of L.A., and I believe of D.C., well,

Speaker 6 it's happening as we speak, so I haven't seen what he said, but certainly in the past, is they are Democrat, as he puts it, Democrat-run cities, you know, incompetently run by low-IQ people, blah, blah, blah, whatever the code word he uses for, you know, for blacks.

Speaker 6 I mean, he doesn't even hide the fact that this is not some neutral application of, you know, of some principle of the crime rate goes above a certain level, we're going to help out the city.

Speaker 6 This is a takeover of Democratic-run cities. And that does, I think, is ominous for the future.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 you might not have even noticed it, but this morning Trump was watching his stories before the press conference and Jasmine Crockett was on TV and he was live tweeting TV, which he likes to do, and he called her low IQ.

Speaker 5 So not subtle.

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Speaker 5 One more Bondi news item from last week that I didn't get to. I think we should mention.

Speaker 5 I'm going to read the New York Post's version of this story just in case you're wondering, in case you like me, don't pick up hard copies of the New York Post that often.

Speaker 5 And I don't really know what the house style is anymore. It's interesting to be caught up on what the house style is.
On Thursday, A.G.

Speaker 5 Pam Bondi appointed Pit Bull lawyer Ed Martin as a special attorney to lead investigations investigations of Tish James and Adam Schiff for potential charges, including mortgage fraud, bank fraud, and wire fraud, which carry jail terms for up to 30 years.

Speaker 5 Grand juries in Virginia and Maryland are weighing criminal indictments against the two Trump-deranged Democrats over allegations they falsified property records to secure favorable loan terms.

Speaker 5 The story provides... literally no information on what the property record situation is and what it was, because that's really not the point.

Speaker 5 It kind of goes on to just talk about how Pam Bondi and Tish James have TDS and how Trump had to deal with law affairs. So now these guys do too.
I mean, again, like

Speaker 5 this is a totally wild, insane story that in a different moment would be a massive scandal, right?

Speaker 5 It's like the DOJ is directing somebody who has been appointed, you know, to this amorphous role within the DOJ, which is basically just to harass Democrats.

Speaker 5 Like that's Ed Martin's job since he didn't get the DC attorney job. And now he's like going after just enemies of the president using grand juries and using the legal system.

Speaker 6 The shift thing, I think I might get this a little wrong. I think this is right.
Was he bought a house or apartment in D.C., and he has one in California, obviously. And I guess there's a question

Speaker 6 I don't have two houses. On your income tax, you declare one a primary residence and the other not.
And that gets you some better, I don't know quite what.

Speaker 6 You can deduct the mortgage interest only on the first one.

Speaker 6 And maybe he said this was his first one, which I take it is something that could be adjudicated in tax court if it's a real issue, or the IRS can complain if they think it's wrong.

Speaker 6 The idea that there's a criminal investigation on this is run out of the U.S. Justice Department is kind of astonishing.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Incidentally, didn't we learn this week that the Speaker of the House seems to have, I don't know, he's, again, I don't know what the law is exactly, but some people think it's dubious that he had his campaign committee paying for his rent in D.C.

Speaker 6 That was at least what was said on the form that was filled out.

Speaker 6 Again, I'm perfectly happy to let this be solved by the FEC if there were a functioning FEC or just let it sit there. But I noticed that there's no special counsel looking at that, right?

Speaker 5 Yeah, the other thing is just similar to your neutral application of the law point on

Speaker 5 D.C. and on whatever, overtaking cities with militarized police.
Like

Speaker 5 the same DOJ that is doing this

Speaker 5 has gutted both the public corruption sector as well as the group that investigates white-collar crime, tax crimes, such as this, right?

Speaker 5 So it's like they've de-emphasized, gutted, said they're not going to look into these types of crimes because they need to focus all of their resources to immigration.

Speaker 5 And simultaneously, it's like, well, but

Speaker 5 we really do have to make one exception for Adam Schiff. Shifty Schiff, you know, because

Speaker 5 of the mortgage deduction he took

Speaker 5 on the wrong house. And it's extremely brazen.

Speaker 6 You mentioned immigration prompts, this thought too, which hadn't hadn't really occurred to me.

Speaker 6 Immigration was the entering wedge for this, you know, for what they did in L.A., of course, in terms of calling out the guard and the Marines and beginning to go after the Democratic cities.

Speaker 6 But that's not the issue here. I mean, it's not, it's not even claimed to be the issue here.
It's just purely the crime rate. D.C.
does not have the highest crime rate in the country.

Speaker 6 D.C.'s crime rate's been coming down. So again, the door is being gradually opened to

Speaker 6 You know, you don't even need the original excuses for federal action because immigration is a federal issue.

Speaker 6 and the border patrol was used right in lay so that's a you know you i mean it's crazy because it's 100 miles from the border but i mean it is sort of the border patrol does exist it is used you know on the border and so forth this is just

Speaker 6 i mean again he has a slight excuse that dc has a special status but the door is now open to to the next place this is one of these things that was a red line january 19th this was an absolute red line people would go crazy even republicans wouldn't accept this tim and they all told us right you know i mean this is something oh man hundreds of years of history republican party the party that's against federal overreach, they would never let this happen.

Speaker 6 I'm curious to see if any Republican anywhere says a word about this.

Speaker 5 I'm not curious. I think that we'll be for it.

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Speaker 5 The lawless administration continues another pretty big issue. The White House made an agreement.
over the weekend with AI chip producers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices AMD.

Speaker 5 The companies have agreed to pay 15% of revenues on chips sold to China to the U.S. government.
This is explicitly unconstitutional. You're not allowed to charge an export tax.

Speaker 5 It's not, I mean, it's like a third term or birthright citizenship level of clear constitutionality. They have pushed forth with it anyway.

Speaker 5 So in addition to the unconstitutionality of it, I also should throw in

Speaker 5 as it relates to just being totally lawless on issues related to China. The TikTok ban.
whatever you think about it, was a bipartisan passed in Congress. It was signed into law by the president.

Speaker 5 Supreme Court upheld it nine to zero, and yet the White House still is not enforcing it.

Speaker 5 So this is another issue where I think that there's a lawlessness angle to it, but also kind of like a soft on China angle to it, right? Like you could, if you're going to be an autocrat here,

Speaker 5 and it's going to be part of, you know, sort of this great power struggle.

Speaker 5 You can imagine a different type of Trump policy here, which would be like, fuck no, our companies are not going to sell advanced AI chips to China. Good luck.
Like over there, Chairman Xi.

Speaker 5 That's not what they're doing. Instead, they're letting China get the advanced AI chips as long as they pay a VIG to the mob boss.

Speaker 6 Yeah, no, my China Hawk friends are really actually think this is pretty serious, maybe more than TikTok actually, you know, in terms of what the AI, this is kind of the,

Speaker 6 are we serious about curtailing China's threat to us, about making sure they don't get too far ahead of us or stay ahead of us,

Speaker 6 get ahead of us? I'm not sure which it is in AI and so forth. And this is really undercuts that.
I also wondered about that 50%.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's all illegal and I don't even know where the money would go, you know, just because it's to just write checks to the federal government. This is how we now run things here.

Speaker 6 You know, I also wonder what's going on with Trump versus Trump couldn't care less. I don't think about whether the federal government gets 15% more revenues from this particular company or

Speaker 6 this kind of illegal tax. What Trump cares about is his own money, right? His own pocketbook.
And it would be worth looking to see what is happening behind the scenes and investments in fake

Speaker 6 Bitcoin companies that Trump and his family control and that just flows right to his pocket. You know, in a way,

Speaker 6 I kind of suspect there's a lot of that going on in these.

Speaker 6 And the whole tariffs, this again is a very traditional critique, a very true one of why you don't want this kind of - it's one thing to have tariffs that are too high if they're universal and set in law.

Speaker 6 It's another thing to have presidents moving around at will. And that just is just an invitation to graft and corruption.

Speaker 5 Indeed. Another just aside, an AI point.
Maybe I'll talk about this more with the tech person later in the week, but I don't know if you saw this. Do you use ChatGPT, Bill Crystal?

Speaker 5 Do you use any LLMs? None?

Speaker 6 No, but of course, we all get AI now because of Google. That's the first option Google gives you on search.
And

Speaker 5 you're writing a morning newsletter. Maybe you should let ChatGPT write it one time.

Speaker 6 Thank you for that vote of confidence in the high quality of morning shots. I really am.
Edgar and I are really deeply moved by your endorsement of a unique editorial project.

Speaker 5 Well, it's five days a week. I mean, you just give one overdate to AI.

Speaker 5 So there is this story. I don't know if people saw it, but it caught my eye in a concerning way.

Speaker 5 So ChatGBT 4 was updated to ChatGBT-5 recently and created a backlash among some users for the reason that some of these users had thought that ChatGBT-4 was their friend and that it was,

Speaker 5 you know, the first person, quote-unquote, to ever give them positive feedback and encouragement. And now

Speaker 5 they feel like that person has been replaced and erased and a new friend has been given to them. That

Speaker 5 was alarming enough when I was caught that. And then late last night, Sam Altman, who runs Open AI, wrote like an 8,000-word tweet, you know, since you don't have limits anymore on X about

Speaker 5 this and about how they want to treat people like adults. And yeah, some people are going to have delusions, like other people are going to use this AI as a life coach and it's going to be useful.

Speaker 5 I'm just like, I don't know, man.

Speaker 5 I don't think it's really a great sign that head of OpenAI felt like they needed to put out a statement because people were upset about their imaginary friend disappearing.

Speaker 6 I mean, I need to educate myself much more in AI, and I really do. And I've been thinking this for two, three months, but I'd say people I know who know a lot about this and

Speaker 6 use it, but also understand a little bit how it works and where it's going and how fast it's going. are much more alarmed than they are.

Speaker 6 Well, they certainly think it's going much faster than they thought six months ago.

Speaker 6 And I would say, though, the people who follow this, of course, tend to be tech optimists because that's why they're in the field and following it in some respects. They're a little freaked out.

Speaker 6 I mean, I think the degree to which we are now in totally uncharted waters and no grown-ups is supervising anything, right?

Speaker 6 I mean, in a normal political system, you know, you could imagine both the executive branch and the legislatures, you know, trying to say, well, let's be careful on this, both from a national security point of view, that's the China question, but also just from a human point of view here.

Speaker 6 No one's trying to even think about how this works, right? Trump's basically just told tells them to go off and do what they want.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the opposite. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's like the one industry that is getting just sort of free reign in here and the Trump administration.

Speaker 5 You know, it's interesting, like I said, I met with the tech guy on later this week, so we might talk about this a little more, but it was part of the rationale for a lot of these Mark Andreessen guys supporting him, right?

Speaker 5 Because they wanted just, they want, they didn't want any adults in charge. They didn't want a principal.
They wanted the, you know, inmates.

Speaker 5 I'm not mixing all the metaphors, but, you know, they wanted to be in charge themselves. All right.
Well, we'll just leave that there. I'm sure that's an uplifting note for people.
I want to close.

Speaker 5 This is kind of a silly example of authoritarian creep, but it is in my area of interest. So I felt like I needed to mention it.
Oasis is coming to America.

Speaker 5 They did their reunion tour, as listeners know. I went to see

Speaker 5 their comeback in Manchester, their homecoming show was unbelievable. They're now coming to America soon as the Unity tour continues.

Speaker 5 Daily Star had a front-page tabloid story on how Oasis is being warned that they should not talk about Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 Top showbidge manager Jonathan Shallett says, My advice to Oasis is simple: stay out of American politics. If they want their U.S.

Speaker 5 tour to go ahead without disruption, it would be wise to keep quiet on all things. Trump, both of them have shit on Trump in the past.
Liam called him a dick.

Speaker 5 Noel talked about his threat to the environment. In 2018, when the two brothers were still feuding, Liam said Noel was even worse than Donald Trump was his attack on his brother.
And so, I don't know.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's a silly tabloid story, yes. It also is

Speaker 5 like an unimaginable story in this country any other time in my lifetime that people would be like, you know, if you're a foreign rock group and you're going to come do shows in America, you shouldn't make fun of the president because they might fuck with your.

Speaker 5 They might fuck with you at customs. They might fuck with your ability to do the shows.

Speaker 6 Yeah, but the worst case, I guess, in the Bush years, maybe you'll you'll lose, they would say, well, you might lose viewers if you, you know, if you insult Bush, sure. Or conversely, obviously.

Speaker 6 But that's more of like a legitimate, you know, you might say market response. This is, yeah, this is very different.

Speaker 6 I was struck. I won't say the details because it's not, it was told to me, you know, just privately, but I mean, a very decent group, a group that you and I would.

Speaker 6 mostly approve of and and the centrists, not Trumpy or anything like that, here in Washington was scheduling some lectures. And

Speaker 6 the staff recommended three or four people who were very good and balanced politically. But one of them was pretty anti-Trump, but very respectable, scholarly, and so forth.
And

Speaker 6 they said, no, it's too risky. You know, with the Trump administration looking at all of us, looking at every think tank, every 501c3, we don't need to pick a fight right now.

Speaker 6 So the kind of, what did Tim Snyder call that?

Speaker 6 Anticipatory compliance, something like that.

Speaker 5 Pre-submission. What was it called? Whatever.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yeah, something like that. Right.

Speaker 6 That's happening more broadly, I think, than I had realized or than I i had expected certainly and again it's a little hard to blame you're running one particular think tank or one particular organization you don't you know you got to watch out for your own people so to speak and you're you don't want to pick a fight but that stuff really adds up and and so i think we're not in good shape here on the authoritarian measurement anticipatory obedience that's not that's not happening here at the bulwark podcast no crystal monday we'll see you back here next week appreciate you very much thanks to everybody else we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 5 We've got an old friend coming back. See you all then.
Peace.

Speaker 5 Another sunny afternoon.

Speaker 5 Walking to the sound of my favorite tune. Tomorrow never knows what it's on to note too soon.

Speaker 5 Need a little time to wake up.

Speaker 5 Need a little time to wake up, wake up.

Speaker 5 Need a little time to wake up.

Speaker 5 Need a little time to rest your mind.

Speaker 5 You know you're shut, so I guess you might as well

Speaker 5 watch the story, morning, glory.

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 need a little time to wake up, wake up.

Speaker 5 What's the story morning glory?

Speaker 5 Where

Speaker 5 need a little time to wake up, wake up.

Speaker 5 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 15 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding.

Speaker 15 Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard, but then we found out she had something called agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult.

Speaker 15 So we asked her doctor for more help.

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Speaker 15 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rick Sulti.

Speaker 16 Talk to your loved ones, doctor. Moments matter.

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