Bill Kristol: This Is So Third World

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

It is Monday, August 4th, so we're here, of course, with editor-at-large Bill Crystal.

How are you doing?

Fine, Tim.

How are you?

I'm doing well.

I'm here in L.A.

And a little programming reminder for everybody, we got that Bulwark takes feed that you should check out if things are happening.

I was out here in LA on Friday and I was over at the Ponte of America studio and we did a pretty funny YouTube video about Candace Owens.

You should check out when all the breaking news was happening around the firing of the Commissioner of Labor Statistics.

So if that happens or we get off scheduled on this podcast, you can check out that feed.

But I have so much more to talk about.

So obviously nobody's missed it at this point, but Trump ordered the firing of the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, essentially the head of of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hours after a government, after her report, or the government report rather, showed significant slowing in the economy in the past three months.

He bleeded that the jobs numbers were all caps rigged in order to make the Republicans and all caps me look bad.

And he attacked McIntarfer personally, and she was dismissed from the role.

There are just so many layers to this story, and it's pretty alarming from an authoritarian creep standpoint, from a you can't believe your lying eyes when it comes to numbers and

the element of how having to lie about bad news is now your obligation if you want to remain a Republican in good standing or a government worker.

And then there's the actual economic numbers themselves.

So I kind of want to talk about the first part first.

Your newsletter started with Democracy Dies in Daylight this morning.

Where's your alarm scale, I guess, following that firing?

It's pretty high.

It's been, as you know, it's been pretty high for quite a while.

But it's going off even another ticket.

It really is, because in the old days, of course, presidents would have, and their staffs would have spun the numbers and they would have said that, you know, it's complicated in the modern economy, the internet, these adjustments are a little bigger than usual.

So you can't be quite sure.

Right.

I mean, that would be a normal, so to speak, a political reaction.

Sure.

Though I will say I've saw an Ernie Tadesky tweet, a shout out to him about how that seems like that could be true logically, but it's actually not.

It's actually not.

The numbers have been more like very recently they've been the revisions have been pretty significant, but like the trend line has been towards these numbers getting more and more accurate.

But anyway, yeah, you know,

to be clear, I wasn't saying that that's that would be accurate to say that.

It would be plausible enough to be adequate spin for the White House press secretary.

Sure, I'm sure.

And certainly for Republican members of Congress and so forth.

But that's not okay anymore.

Spin is not okay.

Now we just have to have, I guess, literally pure, I mean, what, just pure propaganda.

You can't report facts if they run counter to the narrative that America first is fantastic, great, that everything Trump does has instantaneously great results, and that there'll never be a disappointing or down bump in the economy again, as long as Trump is president.

I mean, it's really in a way that he, and there's a bit of a streisand effect, don't you think?

He brought an awful lot more attention to these numbers, which were a little jarring.

They were slowing, but they aren't recessionary exactly.

Just to be clear, I mean, this, as I understand it, this woman is a career civil servant, an economist, very well respected, has been in the government over 20 years, took this job in 2023, I believe, as a promotion from a previous job in the government.

This one is Senate confirmed, was confirmed by something like 86 to 9 or something like that.

Including JD Vance.

And the way that works, incidentally, it is complicated getting these numbers.

It's a survey, and they have to figure out how to weight things.

So many, many, many career economists and career civil servants of other kinds, statisticians, work on this.

The idea that you could snap your fingers and rig it is literally, it's as ludicrous as saying you could rig the 2020 election, which, you know, which is conducted by 50 state governments.

Or the 2024 state election, if you're one of the three blue and non-listeners out there.

But anyway,

yeah, good point.

And then the firing, again, not kind of waiting.

Maybe you'd wait a few months.

Maybe you'd, if you really wanted to kind of

change, you really did think conceivably, I don't know why you would, there's 50 statisticians and economists over at labor, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics are biased against you.

You'd have a review, you'd get a little panel together of economists and business types, and labor would lead, you know, you'd do it, and maybe six months from now, you'd be, of course, none of that is of any interest to them.

They want the firing.

They want the demonstration effect.

They want the intimidation.

They want the sense that the whole government works for Donald J.

Trump, right?

That me that you were laughing about, the capitalized me in his truth social post, is very revealing, though.

Yeah, he sees himself as a capitalized me, like the capitalized G and God, maybe.

The intimidation point is, I think, right.

To me, the two most alarming elements of this is just the straight fundamental fact that this woman, a public servant, lost her job because she reported the facts.

That gets you into a really bad place around the government where you,

like if you are a public employee, you're just trying to make sure that people have the correct information about whatever it is, whether it's hurricane reports or intelligence reports or, you know, military, like you go down the list.

If you put out information

that is true but inconvenient for donald trump then you could lose your job obviously that has a ripple effect throughout the government and we saw this with the dni already this is not the first time uh where tulsi gabbard fired people for not

you know advancing the lie that venezuela you know trenda aragua was uh invading the country under the orders of maduro or whatever the absurd you know proposition they put out there was So now we've seen this a couple of times, and who knows what kind of consequences there are of that.

There's a lot of unpredictable consequences.

And then, specifically, though, in the economic area,

the economy is based in a lot of ways on trust, right?

And the belief that institutions are going to pay their bills, you know, that the numbers that they report are going to be accurate, right?

That there is not going to be some corrupt scheme that hyperinflates or deflates the dollar, right?

Like, this is the reason why the U.S.

has the World Reserve Currency while the U.S.

is still a trusted harbor for investment for people around the world, right?

Like it is because our institutions are strong and legitimate.

If you delegitimize your economic institutions, that puts you on a path to having an economy that looks more like Argentina than the U.S., right?

So I think that

this is just one data point, but in his firing note, he also had the final line about essentially how Jerome Powell might be next.

Watch your back, Jerome Powell.

And I think the systemic economic risk is, you know, not 100% or whatever.

Like, we're not definitely speed running our way towards Argentina hyperinflation, but it's a non-zero risk that the U.S.

no longer feels like a safe and reliable place for investment if you think that the government is going to start putting out fake numbers to please the despot.

Right.

I mean, you would like the government numbers to be as accurate as they can be.

So if you are making an investment and you see recession coming, maybe you pull back a bit or the opposite.

I mean, the almost, I don't know, more metaphysical point or whatever is the kind of Havel Hannah Arendt type point.

It's a little too deep for me,

but it's true, I think.

They really want, authoritarians want to discredit the notion of truth, of objective truth, of facts.

And it just becomes he says this, you say that.

It means that if things really do go downhill, Trump just keeps saying that don't believe what you're seeing.

They're not going downhill or not even quite hang on through a tough patch like a Reagan message or something like that.

Or there are just cycles in the economy, let's say, which might be a more traditional Bush-Obama type message.

It's, you know, don't believe what you're seeing.

And also, I do think that this particular data, who knows how important it is, I don't.

But there are many, many other data that the federal government puts out, right?

That people depend on for all kinds of things, you know?

And I do think in that respect, it just, it's third world.

It's literally third world.

And Mark Cuban has been good on this over the weekend.

He posted just for example of other data, the BLS also is responsible for CPI, which is used to set the annual increases for social security, right?

So it's not even like, so that's like a very tangible effect on people's lives, right?

Like if Trump, it's not crazy at this point to say hypothetically, they don't want it to seem like there's inflation, you know, and so they put out fake numbers.

And so inflation is happening, but seniors don't get the increase in their social security that they would have otherwise.

Am I predicting that's going to happen?

No, but if you're in a position where you're firing the people that give out bad news, then like there are going to be, you know, real consequences for that.

And, you know, Cuban was also going back and forth with some of the, you know, Trump fluffers on social media about all this.

Trump takes advantage of these things that are like complicated and people don't understand, right?

To pursue conspiracies, and you saw this with the 2020 election, but it's like I can understand how people are like, it is kind of weird that the numbers, you know, it said 200,000 jobs last month, and then they're like, oh no, we're off by 100,000.

Like, that seems like a big mistake.

But it's just like, that's the nature of how these things work, right?

Like, there, you take surveys at the end of the month, you report on what the surveys from the businesses said.

More surveys come in the next month, you update them.

And like, in a lot of ways, this update, you know, getting to the actual economy side of this,

brought

the government's reports in line with what people were seeing anecdotally.

You were seeing a lot of report

conversation in Econ Nerd World over the last couple of weeks, which is like, why is the economy so strong?

We're seeing all these underlying things to be worried about, whether it be the tariffs,

concerns about the debt and deficit and interest rate increases.

You're seeing these anecdotal reports in the regional feds about businesses saying that they're not investing and not hiring hiring right now.

And like, why is

the top line number so

continuing to

feel like the economy is strong and growing when there are all these other negative signs?

And like this adjustment really just sort of brought in line with, I think, what everybody has felt like was happening, which is that we have a slowing economy.

I don't know what you think of all that.

It seems that way.

But again, I come back to your point about the CPI.

The discrediting of the numbers has all kinds of effects.

And the firing has its intimidation effect.

The discrediting of the numbers has real effects on

politics conceivably.

Do we trust that before Election Day in 2026, when there's the third quarter of GDP, which I think is usually late October, or many, many other, obviously monthly and all kinds of employment inflation numbers, do we trust in 2028 that we're going to get honest numbers?

I mean, I really, you know.

How could you?

Yeah.

So that's really bad.

I mean, then you really are, you know, it's this is one.

In other words, this is the, he's doing this six months in.

He could easily have written this out.

I think he wants to establish the predicate for both the firing of people and the intimidation side of it and the discrediting of facts and of, you know, government facts that heretofore have been put out by the U.S.

government and are treated in a very bipartisan way when they come out, I mean, or few just not partisan when they come out.

And he wants to discredit that.

So then it just becomes, you know, we say this and they say this.

Yeah.

Do you have any other big economic thoughts?

I mean, you know, you are seeing this big article about how

much Vegas is struggling.

Like, you're starting to see this in these early indicators of, you know, where do people start to pull back, you know, things like vacations and such.

I'm taking the kids to Universal today here in LA, so I'll be able to report back on how crowded that that feels.

But, you know, you're starting to see some evidence of

people having real worries about the economy.

And if you looked at the actual report, I mean, the jobs right now are essentially in health care, elder care, and,

you know, investment into AI and

data centers.

As our buddy Derek Thompson wrote about the economy, he goes, economic growth is right now is basically a Friday church service, just old people plus trying to summon God.

And like, it's not, it was like the underlying numbers were

pretty stark.

I don't know.

And like, to me, that is the biggest risk for Trump.

And while the lying is dangerous, you know, you can only lie so much about the economy, or maybe you can't.

I don't know.

What you say does affect real things, like Social Security and other things.

It gives them an excuse for conceivably to fire Powell, you know, in other circumstances.

And so it could affect real policy.

But no, no, I agree.

The reality does

hit at some point, that's for sure.

So you can't just lie your way through that.

The economy is so complicated, though.

And the people make decisions based on anticipating things are going to happen, but that can be good for short-term economic growth.

People import more.

They go out.

They think things are going to slow down later.

So they buy prices are going to go up later from tariffs.

So they buy stuff now.

So I kind of think he's been, Trump has probably been benefiting a little bit from people front-running, so to speak, expectations and spending a little more than they might have.

And they're getting ready to pull back.

I think the tariffs have had a delayed effect, but they're not going away.

And

the chaos isn't stopping either.

So it feels to me like it could well slow down, but I mean, it's a very big economy on the other hand, a lot of innovation.

So who knows?

It is, yeah.

I will say one thing.

I feel like a fly over country bumpkin coming out to LA now.

I've just lived in New Orleans a couple of years.

And I mean, my hamburgers are very expensive.

I don't know how people live out here.

Producer Katie, I don't know what you're doing out here if you don't if you're not a millionaire.

And I do think that like there was this big discussion about Biden over is it the fact that he was messaging it poorly or is it inflation really harmful?

And like, you know, Sarah and JVL would fight about this all the time on the Secret podcast.

And, you know, there's a little bit from column A and column B.

But I don't know.

The reality of people's lives in certain parts of the country, at least, I think, are you can only do so much spin, I guess, if you can't afford your life.

I mean, I've had the sense that inflation is higher than I would have thought, given that it's supposed to be down at, you know, 2.5 or something and not like late 2021 and all of 2022 when it really was at 7, 8, 9%.

Of course, you could see it in real time.

But it feels to me like things are continuing to go up quite a lot.

I guess we had that piece about a week ago on Morning Shots, a guest piece by Chris Trux, actually, from California.

So maybe that's why he was so struck by this on meat prices, which have gone up quite a lot, hamburger and beef in the last.

So maybe that's why your hamburger was more expensive.

You was struck by how expensive it was.

But incidentally, one reason they've gone up a lot is we have pretty high tariffs on countries from which we import a lot of beef.

Mexico, but I think especially Brazil turns out to be.

And so that is a thing that's partly at least caused by Trump's actual policies.

It's not simply an

outside variable that's hitting the economy, so to speak, or a macro variable.

Democrats might make that point a little more.

Inflation did hurt Biden a lot.

I'm all for making a big point about Medicare.

God knows I'm for making a big point about Epstein, but they shouldn't forget about inflation.

Well, particularly, I mean, there are going to be a lot of those swing house seats are actually in blue states.

So it cuts against

in places like this, because the Democrats did, and maybe, and this is probably why, but like the Democrats did unusually poorly in Southern California, New York, you know, places like that.

And a lot of those, you you know, seats are going to be back up again.

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Speaking about more political stuff, I think the big news of the day is what's happening in Texas with redistricting.

Talked about this a lot with Mark Elias on Thursday.

Sam Stein is interviewing James Tallerico, who is in the Texas legislature.

Democrats have got one on Rogan recently.

And so that will be on the aforementioned Bulwark takes feed.

But the Texas Dems have now disembarked to Illinois to not give Abbott and the Texas Republicans a quorum for their redistricting vote, for their gerrymandering vote.

Abbott is threatening to like strip the,

to banish any Democrat who doesn't show up to vote from public office.

I don't exactly know what the rules are on that, but that's the threat that Abbott's putting out there.

What's your sense of what's happening on the ground with the story?

I mean, the Abbott statement, which I think is very late last night, but I saw it this morning, is worth looking at.

It really, I mean, it's got sort of fake legal, you know, citations in it and so forth, but it basically says that if you don't show up, they can kind of declare the seat in effect vacant.

You've vacated your seat.

And then you're not a member of the Texas legislature anymore.

And then you have the two-thirds quorum, which is what you need to do business.

The number, you know, what is it?

The denominator goes, my math's not so good anymore.

The denominator goes down so that the Republicans, in effect, create a quorum.

And he says at 3 p.m.

this afternoon, if the Democrats aren't back, he says he's going to do this.

I was talking to some lawyers earlier who said, well, you really should go to court and establish that you have the right to do it, but he's going to do it and let them challenge him in court.

So I think we could be at a pretty big crisis this afternoon, not crisis, but just a moment this afternoon where, in effect, Abbott has vacated 50 Democratic seats, at least for now, and had a vote and redistricted Texas to try to create five additional Republican congressional seats.

And then he'll dare, you know, go ahead and sue.

Good luck in the Texas courts incidentally and maybe even the federal courts down there.

And, you know, it'll take a while anyway, right?

So, I mean, and it was coordinated with the Justice Department.

Remember, they laid the predicate for this a while ago by saying they have problems with the way the Texas seats were constructed because they created some majority-minority districts.

That's contrary, that's DI-like, I suppose.

I'm sure Justice Way in defending Abbott, and they think they can pick up five seats.

Maybe they're overestimating, but that would be big, right?

If there's another close, obviously, evenly divided vote for the House.

It's big anyway, it's a lot of seats, given how few are in play, basically.

So, yeah, you know, the free and fair elections, I'm a little worried about that.

People have been saying this, it's happening.

It's happening.

Bayer's trying to move a non-trivial number of seats with a mid-year redistricting, which is almost never been done.

It's not once actually in Texas.

However, political gerrymandering is, at least it's sort of attached to the every 10-year census and redistricting.

So it's sort of like, you know, what is coming, you know, et cetera.

It has a certain legality.

Well, it is legal, has a certain, you might say, regularity.

And now if every state could just redistrict whatever, it's a good moment for them.

And Florida's talking where they're gaining up population, they should have a decade redistricting.

Also, they should get some more seats, they're saying.

I saw some Republican member of Congress saying they want to introduce a bill to actually adjust the seats of the states because of this population growth.

I mean, this is literally the kind of stuff that Orban did, though, also change the rule.

Not so much change.

Everyone still goes and votes.

You and I will go cast our vote, right?

But you change the rules enough and you change the apportionment and districting enough, and then you collude with red states, make it a lot easier for them to do it than blue states, which incidentally, some of which have independent commissions.

It's happening, it's happening, I guess is what I'm saying.

In a bad way, a couple of thoughts.

Like, here is the actual statement for ABBA, just so people get it.

The derelict Democrat House members must return to Texas and be in attendance when the House reconvenes at 3 p.m.

on Monday, August 4th.

For any member who fails to do so, I will invoke Texas Attorney General Opinion Number KP0382 to remove the missing Democrats from membership in the Texas House.

I mean, that is.

Kind of amazing, right?

Elected officials.

Right, it is.

I mean, it's extremely amazing and alarming.

Trump thinks he can fire everyone in the federal government, basically, even if they're traditionally protected, you know, sort of, or even if they're traditionally that they shouldn't be fired, or even if they're laws in some cases, they shouldn't be.

Texas Abbott now thinks he can fire elected Democratic members of his own legislative body.

Yeah.

He feels like he can take away the choice of his own citizens, right?

I mean, it's Texas citizens that voted to elect these people to represent them.

And Abbott feels like he can, as, I guess, a soft dictator of Texas, determine, you know, whether or not those votes were valid.

Just as a quick aside, I do wish they wouldn't have gone to Illinois, which is like the worst gerrymandered state on the Democratic side.

They did it, as you mentioned, in the normal, regular gerrymandering sense.

But even still, I do hate the talking point.

I've seen a lot of social media posts about how the Democrats have fled to a state that then they show the pictures of the district where, you know, they're not the prettiest districts.

Let's just say they're not exactly contiguous.

But that said, Tallarico, in the conversation with Sam, says that, you know, he thinks that California and Illinois and all these states should move immediately to deal with this, which, you know, is also what Elias said last Thursday.

I think that's true.

And you end up in this kind of race to the bottom situation, which kind of adds in like larger questions about

how we kind of unravel all this if we ever get past Donald Trump.

But I feel like that's kind of a question for 2029.

And the more urgent question is on what to do now to try to offset some of this.

I mean, I don't, Elias, I felt like in our conversation, was more bullish than I am about the number of potential seats that Democrats could find.

I think there are more potential seats for Republicans to squeeze out of this than Democrats.

But that doesn't mean they shouldn't try.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

I agree with that last point.

I've looked on it quickly, but I think California is already like 43 to 9 or something like that.

And Illinois is pretty lopsided.

New York has a pretty strict rule about the independent commission.

It's going to be a little hard to get around that, I think.

So I haven't looked in any detail.

And I'm sure lawyers can find their way and governors maybe can find their way.

I think Newsom is going to have a tough time getting it to be much more lopsided than it is, though.

So yeah, so I'm slightly pessimistic about the real world

arms race working out okay for Democrats.

I'm not entirely sure sure they'll go ahead with the arms race.

Incidentally, they do believe in these independent commissions in some respects, and they've put them in place in some of these states.

If this were happening in a foreign country, as is the cliche these days, you'd say this country is in some danger of splitting apart.

I mean, this is like the 1850s in America, right?

Each side kind of escalates, you know, and kind of blocking the other side from having any power at all in their own states, you know.

And it is being caused by Trump and by the Republicans, obviously.

The Democrats will or won't respond, but there'll be no question who's going first here.

And it's very bad.

I mean, it's really dangerous.

I feel like we need an 1850s historian on were, I don't know, just regular old tobacco farmers just going along with their lives, though, in the 1850s while this was happening.

Maybe so.

To me, like that is the...

the cognitive dissonance that you try to deal with in all this, where you're like, structurally speaking, the fabric of the democracy is tearing.

It's not just fraying.

It's like being torn apart.

Like, meanwhile,

it doesn't feel day-to-day when you're at the Ralphs here that we're on the brink of civil war.

I don't know.

That would be a good thing to discuss with someone who studied the 50s.

Ron Brownstein's obsessed with the 50s analogy, but he's not himself a historian, though.

He's read a lot of stuff about it.

But I do think, you know, I vaguely remember this when I read it, used to know a little more about this.

You know, one of the puzzles in a way was that most people in the South are not slave owners, right?

I mean, most people were not wealthy, obviously.

They were whatever they were, small farmers and you know small merchants and so forth but they were they went along so you know what i mean there was never a real resistance to the um slave occracy so yeah there is a way in which these things have a momentum of their own i suppose sort of similar in terms of media though and the kind of one-sided account of everything that's so dominated in these different states i i think it's i think that's also true well a little civil war chat for your monday morning uh here at the bulwark

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The other news in Texas is Jelaine Maxwell, one of the most

depraved and sick child sex traffickers that we've encountered in the country recently has been moved from Florida to a more minimum security prison in Texas.

I had a listener emailed, and I did not, I don't know how to fully vet this, but based on their understanding, it's the only example of someone with this type of crime who is now in this type of more minimum security prison in the country.

Obviously, that was part of a deal that was made with Trump's personal attorney, turned deputy attorney general Todd Blanche before they met in Florida.

I mean, it doesn't look good.

And I think that we are kind of reaching a polarization point here where I haven't seen quite as much outrage from the sort of Epstein right as I might have thought on something like this.

And if you're the type of person who really genuinely cares about predation of children, then giving Ghelene Maxwell some positive treatment and letting her have a more easy time in prison, you would think would

violate those principled views.

But I don't know.

We'll see.

What did you make of the news with Ghelene?

No, I agree with what you said.

And

this really is a kind of club-fed type prison based on my reading about it and their own promotional materials about how they have yoga classes and all this kind of stuff.

I mean, it looks a little bit like a

goat yoga for Glenn.

I saw that Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

was doing some is doing some goat yoga at at some Maha HHS event.

Now, if that was a Democratic administration, you would think that would be mocked pretty relentlessly as some globalist, elite, socialist thing.

But I guess goat yoga is in now on the right.

So Glenn and RFK.

It is.

It's amazing.

I sort of agree about the right.

The right seems to have

is gradually succumbing to Trump and losing whatever authentic, if it was authentic,

outrage about what Epstein and Maxwell did, as opposed to outrage about, you know, that's more of a

Clinton conspiracy kind of, you know, sort of QAnon type thing.

Um, I hope there's a lot of Americans are still outraged, though, I would think.

Ari Melber made this point.

I was on with him Friday night, and he actually

hit the core point, which is this is different from Blanche going and having a conversation with Maxwell.

It's different from even not releasing the files, going to try to get the grand jury test.

I mean, all that stuff is processed and sort of hard to tell.

I mean, we think it's not legit, so to speak.

We think we know what the motives might be.

We don't know what Blanche and Maxwell said.

This is an actual deed.

This is an actual thing that they did.

There's no, it didn't happen normally.

There's zero justification.

And I looked at the Bureau of Prisons' actual handbook for putting someone convicted of the crime she was convicted of in this club-fed, a very light security prison.

Can only be done at the direction of the director of the Bureau of Prisons and presumably of the Attorney General.

And presumably, Trump knew something about it.

I mean, this is really straight up it's not quite a pardon of her but it's it's a step towards a pardon right it's they have done something to make her life much better yeah are they promising war are they are they is it an inducement is it a reward is it what i guess we'll find out but i i yeah i think people really should be just horrified by this and i think a lot of people are we'll be just gonna see in the town halls and stuff how much it comes up yeah but i think maga is sort of i don't know how much is trump able to get them back on board i can't quite tell i think he's gonna be able to get the core folks back on board for sure.

But I definitely think that there is

my guess is: if I looked into my crystal ball, my past is not 100% on the crystal ball, you know.

So it's not a magic crystal ball.

Shacking.

Every once in a while, I get some false positives.

It's kind of like a ChatGPT situation where they get a, every once in a while, it just makes up an answer.

But I think that if you look a couple years from now and looking back on this, you'll see this is the time that Trump kind of lost that alternative media manosphere type person more than the actual MACA person.

And they say that this was the moment where it was like a trust was broken.

Like he broke trust with us.

And you and I and our listeners can all say it was ridiculous you had any trust with this con man ever, but a lot of them did.

And they felt like he was going to challenge the status quo and challenge all the things that they had complaints about.

And it's just preposterous the way he's acting on this.

And that and it will be an easy, kind of in the way that the Hillary deplorable thing was like an easy shorthand.

You know, sometimes things just break through and become a shorthand for certain parts of the audience.

And I think that this, this group, well, this will end up being the shorthand of them seeing Trump as a typical politician or as a liar or as sleazy or as not trustworthy.

And I think that's not insignificant.

And just back to your point, really quick on Goan, like for me, you know, we have two facts now about this that are like very simple to explain: that

the Trump administration is covering up

the mentions of the president in the Epstein files.

We know that.

Like, they have an Epstein file, they have a file that includes all the flags of Trump's names, and they're covering up.

They don't want to show it.

So, we know that there's a cover-up about Trump's involvement.

We don't know the extent of it or what is actually in there or why they're covering it, but we know they're covering it up, Trump's relationship with Epstein and the extent of it.

And we know also that they're, you know, now giving friendlier, lighter treatment to Glenn Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's second in command, whatever, ringleader, the person that was recruiting and grooming all of the girls that he was assaulting and raping.

So

those are just two simple facts that this is what the government's doing.

They're covering up Trump's involvement and they're giving Maxwell lighter treatment than she otherwise would have gotten.

And so people can take with those what they will.

Do you have anything else on this?

I want to talk about Judge Box of Wine as well.

We have some news about our new

U.S.

Attorney.

Just that I think Democrats really need to keep the pressure up.

They should read excerpts from these, the documents that are public, which include trial, obviously, transcripts and the indictments and stuff, but other things that people have said, you know,

other victims have said on the floor of the House and the Senate when they get back.

I mean,

I feel this personally, when you really hear what happened, and when you really hear how close Trump was to what happened, it changes one's view from, oh, he's covering up some embarrassing stuff.

You know,

what would we do anyway if we saw it, to really a more sinister thing, honestly.

So I hope they stay on this.

I do too.

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On to Pierrot.

So on Saturday,

we're laughing, but you laugh to not cry only in this situation.

The Senate approved the nomination of Janine Pierrot to be the top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., U.S.

Attorney, a very prominent and significant post.

She was confirmed in a 50 to 45 vote, which I think there were no actual no votes from Republicans.

The only reason that she only had 50 was that several people didn't show up to the vote.

So I think that she received every single Republican's confirmation for this post.

I think it bears mentioning when you consider the fact that Janine Pirro will be the lead prosecutor in the in the District of Columbia for our government, that during the discovery of the Fox Dominion lawsuit, the person that oversaw her shoe, it's not a random person, executive David Clark, said that he took her off the air after the 2020 election because, quote, I don't trust her to be responsible.

Her guests are all going to say the election is being stolen.

And if she pushes back at all, it will just be a token.

Internal Fox communications show her executive producer describing her as a reckless maniac who is nuts, promotes conspiracy theories, and should never be on live television.

So her own staff think think she's a reckless maniac who should not be trusted to be on live television.

And every Republican member of the United States Senate thought she should be the lead prosecutor in Washington, D.C.

It's

pretty dark stuff.

It is.

So he's lost no confirmation votes, if I'm not mistaken.

Is that right?

He pulled it with Drew Gates and he with Drew Martin.

For this post, actually.

This was Ken Martin's.

Yeah.

Martin was for this coast.

So he was somehow reached too far, but Piero's fine.

And I mean,

that sort of does say it all, right?

I mean, you nominate P.

Tech Seth and Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

and Tulsi Gabbard and Janine Piro and that guy Bove for the Third Circuit.

And they're all much, a little bit of hoopla and a little hand-wringing.

At the end of the day, 50, 51, 52 votes.

I mean, going back to the Social Security thing, though, this is a real job.

Yeah.

I don't know.

This is not like being appointed to the Deputy Secretary of Commerce or whatever.

Like,

this is a real job.

And I guess it relates also to the Maxwell conversation that, you know, is on behalf of ostensibly a Law and Order Party.

Like there are very serious prosecutions of dangerous people that need to happen in

the District of Columbia

district.

And you need a U.S.

attorney there that is like capable of doing the job.

And

like the idea that they fired Maureen Comey, that actual qualified prosecutors are fleeing this office, and Janine Pirau is going to be in charge of prosecuting these crimes is preposterous.

And it's not, I don't think it reached too far to say it's dangerous.

And it is certainly

essentially, will get me to my next topic, making the government totally complicit in all corruption, all public corruption, because I don't think anyone can possibly take seriously that Janine Pirro is going to be, you know, a bulldog as the U.S.

Attorney on public corruption, given who's in power right now in Washington.

I mean, I think the Justice Department, I was thinking about this this morning, like, which department has been damaged the worst by Trump, and maybe hopefully not irreparably, but the most lasting damage?

And also moved the furthest.

What important department has been moved the furthest from anything resembling responsibility, competence, something one could trust?

And I think justice is probably, I mean, DHS was never great.

It's obviously terrible in my view.

DOD may be been tougher.

The uniformed military is a little excess ridiculous, but the uniformed military has more of a ballast, so to speak, against this.

Treasury, who knows, but it seems a little less crazy.

Justice is really, and I was talking with someone who's worked there, a career person who's leaving.

People who tried to say at the beginning, and that's true, the person I was talking to, thought they could do some good, thought they could probably not have to do the most political stuff.

They just believed in being public servants at the attorneys at the U.S.

at the Department of Justice, turned down jobs in the past at three times the salary and stuff, leaving.

They can't deal with it.

So you can gonna have a hollowed out justice department they're replacing them incidentally trust they're putting in all their loyalists i mean justice is going to have you know it's going to be 60 pambontis if i can put it that way it's not like there's going to be a career staff down there that can stop stuff from happening i think in other departments it's a little more complicated we'll see bureau of labor statistics well for now the number two is taking over an awful lot of people work there you'd have to spend a fair amount of time you know going through them so to speak or intimidating them to kind of get to steve bannon said we got to get our people there and to the bureau of labor statistics and i was like do you have people that do statistics?

They do have a fair number of lawyers.

I mean, there are a lot of lawyers in the country.

They're not great.

Anyway, I do think justice is, I mean, and if you care about the rule of law, obviously.

If you care generally, though, about the key agencies of government, you were making fun of Deputy Secretary of Commerce before.

If you care about justice, defense, intelligence community.

DHS is important.

What's happened to justice is really unbelievable.

Joe Pertico and I did the Sunday show with him yesterday, and he said he thought he wondered if Matt Gates was now regretting having pulled out in November, December.

He would have gotten confirmed too, right?

He has to be regretting.

I said this to him.

I saw Matt in the lobby of a hotel in Phoenix over Christmas.

You know, Matt and I are like the same age, and I worked at the sisters.

I know Matt a little bit.

I went up to him and I was like, why did you pull out, so to speak?

I was like, number one, you made me look like a bad pundit because I was on TV saying you were going to get confirmed.

And number two, I think I was right, actually.

I think that, you know, you would have been confirmed.

It's also hard to see how Gates would have been any worse than this because your assessment is correct.

And I think that the DOJ

is getting completely hollowed out.

And I think that, again, going back to this question of,

even in a best case scenario, what do we do in 2029 to

kind of reassert some type of rule of law and norms?

That's going to be the hardest place to do it, right?

Because of the A, the new lawyers that are in there, Cash Patellis,

a 10-year term, right?

Like you have all of these elements.

And once you've kind of broken this idea that the DOJ is independent, you know, it'll take smarter people than me to create new rules that reassert a DOJ independence.

Because to me, that is like the other element of this, despite besides the actual staff, there's no pretense that the DOJ is an independent institution anymore.

And so,

you know, once you see that that is how things worked, right, like how do you convince people that, you know, that

we've moved back to a place where it's independent?

I think it's very challenging.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And if you are worried about election interference in 2026 and 2028, which one should be, DOJ is probably the key

part of the federal government through which that would run, as we saw that in pre-January 6 maneuverings where they refused to do what Trump wanted to do.

Barr quit, first of all, and then the others wouldn't go along with his attempts.

But if you've got people spending weeks, months, year, two and a half, two and a a half, three years plotting of how states run the elections primarily, but if you've got people at the federal level plotting how to undermine that and undermine voting rights in the more obvious ways, but also just the whole way the election system is supposed to work, casting doubt on it, supporting legal challenges by troublemakers at every key state that this election commissioner should be thrown out or disbarred.

I mean, I think it's a very worrisome.

Yeah.

Elias was really good on this.

And it's like, really, the biggest concern is the post-election.

Like, what is the, what is DOJ done?

You know, not that there's no concerns about pre-election.

Obviously, redistricting is concerned, voter suppression.

There's some concerns.

He's like, but the most acute concern, it's like

after-election, DOJ interference and throwing out votes, right?

Like all this kind of, all this kind of stuff.

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With Zen, you don't just find freedom, you keep finding it again and again.

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Learn more at Zinn.com.

Warning, this product contains nicotine.

Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Just really quick on the corruption thing since I mentioned it.

There was a big New York Times story over the weekend.

We'll just put it in the show notes if people want to read it.

But like the scale of Trump's corruption, I do think might be be the biggest story that is getting lost amidst all of the other craziness.

You know, the crypto contributions, which we've talked about several times here, but the Times sort of like lays them out, you know, talking about people that give huge amount of money and then the SEC stops looking into them, people that are giving a huge amount of money directly into Trump's coin.

Like there were some people giving money to his campaign coffers, which is bad enough.

Traditional insider corruption.

In these cases, it's people giving money directly to Trump and Trump's family.

family and there's one case the new york times stories they talk about coinbase

which i contributed 10 million or something and the times article didn't even mention the fact that like that there was some oversight of coinbase or some like investigations sec was looking into them that were dropped so like in this story that lays out all the different corruptions they even weren't including some things there was the pardon buying uh you know it go it goes on and on i mention it just because i don't want it to get lost and i do think you you know, when you think about the political side of this, making Trump into a normal, dirty politician is an important job for the Democrats, I think, in the coming two years.

And sometimes I feel like it gets lost.

This goes all the way back to 2015.

I was briefing the Hillary Super PAC on like what we learned from the primary, or I guess it was 2016.

And I was like, you know, we never really tried to like turn him into a corrupt, like make it about corruption and make him about screwing people over to enrich himself.

And I think that a lot of times broadly, people that pay close attention and Democrats are like, everybody knows that Trump's a huckster, right?

And a shyster.

And it's kind of like, not really.

I don't think actually.

I mean, I think that some people know it and like it that support him.

They're like, it's fine.

We want our, you know, it's a corrupt system.

We want our own corrupt guy.

But I don't know.

I think that there's another group of people that are that are reachable by turning him into somebody that's more looking out for his own interests.

I don't know.

Is that wrong, you think?

No, I think that's right.

I think, yeah, I thought Trump University might, you know, really ripping off working-class people with fake promises that this would help their lives and their incomes in the most shameless way.

I thought that might have an effect in 2015, 16.

I think you did too.

I think, but it didn't.

This is a little different, though, because he's president, right?

So the corruption is not.

It's one thing for a businessman to be a bit of a huckster, but okay, he'll get to Washington and there'll be rules and he'll be constrained.

Now he is president.

Corruption is, as you say, utterly mind-boggling.

I think it could be politically taken advantage of.

Maybe.

On the other hand, a huge amount of money is flowing to his personal pockets, obviously, and the family, but an awful lot is flowing to his super PAC and other Republican pockets.

I don't know.

If this goes on for three more years, the disproportion of, and also

they're scowling at people who might give to the Democrats.

And I've been told there is some intimidation going there in terms of self-intimidation, you might say, by some donors and by corporations.

They used to give evenly very, you know, we're a big business.

We've got to support our Democrats.

You and I remember this.

You got to support our Democratic and Republican friends equally.

Now it's a little more, well, we'll support a few Democrats a little, but we've got to support the Republicans much more.

And, you know, money doesn't buy elections.

I mean, in America, luckily, it's overrated, I'd say, generally, but still, if it gets to enough of a disproportionate, it could have a real effect.

It's another form of election interference, right?

Yeah.

Murphy, Chris Murphy is really strong on this.

It was something I hadn't really been thinking about, and now I'm kind of dialing in on a little bit more.

So we're going to keep monitoring that stuff.

All right, while we do Democrats, just really quick, one more thing: Corey Booker was on the floor of the Senate late last week going crazy over

like the details of this are kind of not really even worth getting into, but like it's a police kind of reform bill and funding bill.

And Booker is the Booker side of the argument, is basically we shouldn't be cutting deals with these guys on anything.

I represent a blue state.

Who the hell knows?

We cut a deal with them on some police funding issue, and they end up clawing it back for blue states under some pretense that we don't do DEI right or something.

And why should we be going along with them at all?

Like, especially after they just, what they did, just did with rescissions.

Like we should just be fighting them on everything, tooth and nail.

Basically, I came down on the side of like some of the details of Corey's point were like a little bit hard to follow.

And it was a little bit kind of hard to follow the intensity of his speech on the Senate floor and like what the, you know, what exactly he was arguing.

But like the broader principle,

I found myself very much on his side of this.

And I think that it is pretty, you know, you see things like Gene Shaheen agreeing to, you know, advance, was it Bove?

I forget who she voted to confirm one of these horrible people that they're confirming in exchange for, you know, money for Haiti or whatever.

And I'm for money for Haiti.

Like, I'm for all this.

But like these guys have proven themselves totally untrustworthy.

And just from a strategic standpoint, I don't know that there's really a lot of strong arguments for doing bipartisan deals with Jon Thun, I guess, at this point.

But maybe, I don't know.

Where are you on that, Bill?

Exactly where you are.

I think on the details, yes, Booker could have raised this months ago.

They got it through committee.

It's a classic bipartisan bill.

You introduce a poison bill amendment.

It breaks apart a bill that's probably mostly okay.

Yeah, sure.

Klobuchar negotiated it with with republican members i don't know if the administration was even that much involved but having said that yeah so on the trees level i'm slightly you know booker may not is not the best instance of maybe picking this fight sure you know what i'll say in just

you can't sit around saying well that this is really a good one to pick the fight on this is an eight i'm not going to do the fight that's only a four because you know i don't that's ridiculous at some point you just got to say you know what they should all fight some of these fights are going to be more you know worthwhile and a little more defensible in the details than others all this is setting up a huge question for September, which we'll talk about over the next several weeks, which is what does Schumer do when it really does come to a serious question of compromising with they need 60 votes to keep the government open and pass appropriations bills?

And does Schumer provide or Democrats provide votes to go along with food and keep Trump's government working, you know, working away, transferring Maxwell to low-security prisons, you know?

and firing heads of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I mean, you can't shut down the government for three years, obviously.

but somehow it can't just be business as usual.

I guess I'm with Booker on that.

Yeah, it can't.

And sometimes I find myself like my,

I don't want to be blinded by my personal hatred and distaste for the Republican senators and their fucking craven behavior over the past nine years, but I'm just even the whole thing of like,

if you're sitting down with them to do some bipartisan deal at this point, like, shouldn't they be forced to take some pain?

You know, like, that's my thing.

I just like even the notion of Senator Klobuchar, like, going, you know, like, oh, we need to cut a deal with them because this bill is so important.

It's like, well, okay.

Well, if it's that important, then shouldn't they not get Janine Pierrow, a total psychopath, as the U.S.

attorney?

Shouldn't that be part of the deal?

Shouldn't the food that is rotting away in storage bins and the UAE be delivered to the poorest people in the world?

Shouldn't we make sure that we're doing that?

Like, you know, I just, they're doing so much stuff that is so beyond the pale that the compartmentalization,

like, there's an easy, like, I think it's much easier if you're a U.S.

senator, I get it, to compartmentalize all the bad stuff and be like, okay, I'm not going to pick fights with them on this.

I don't want to, I'm not going to make enemies.

I'm not going to shout at them on the Senate floor.

Like, I'm just going to, you know, argue against the bad things they do.

And on these few areas, work with them in ways to make things better.

Most of the time,

I would say that's probably the right and grown-up thing to do.

I just don't think we're in most of the time right now, I guess, is where I land on it.

Well, this is a piece of legislation.

I'd say in Booker's defense, I think you said he was only a four, only four or something.

I mean, there's appropriations, I think, is the strongest case for you got to keep the government functioning.

We need to have Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security work.

So you have to ultimately probably vote for appropriations bills for the different agencies of the federal government.

And you don't get everything you want or most of what you want in those bills.

This is a fresh piece of legislation.

It wasn't obviously necessary that it exist, right?

So, in that respect, Booker is right.

Why are you going out of your way

to pass this legislation?

Which is basically about law enforcement, which you'd think you could add some provisions about like ICE people wearing masks and

shipping people to

Club Fed or whatever.

I guess that was a little afterwards.

But anyway, yeah.

So

I'm where you are in this.

They need to toughen up, but it's hard.

And there's a lot of

kind of inside-baseball institutional pressure, go along, get along pressure, some pressure from within their states to get make sure they get certain things.

So, uh, I think September will be very that will be an interesting moment for the Democrats.

It will.

We've come a long way, Corey Booker.

You blocked me on Twitter in 2011.

Really?

Oh, yeah, he blocked me.

I was going after, he had a kind of a composite character in one of his books called T-Bone.

Oh, right.

He's kind of not true.

Not really a true person.

He kind of mid-made it up.

And I was teasing him about that on Twitter.

And, you know, it gets a little too close to to home, it turned out.

But he unblocked me recently, which I appreciate.

He did on the podcast?

Oh, yeah, he came on.

I got him to Unblock Me Live.

I guess you missed that episode, Bill.

It's okay.

Not everybody can listen to every episode.

It's fine.

Yeah, I got him to Unblock Me Live.

Many of your fans do listen to every episode.

I know.

And

I appreciate the everydayers.

But, you know,

it's a lot of content we're putting out there.

But unblocked you.

That's good.

Yeah, Corey, blocked, unblocked.

And now here we are coming to his defense in an internicing democratic fight.

You know, life is long.

It's important to keep the opportunity to, you know, keep relationships open.

I have one final thing, Bill, that is not really aimed at you, but for the audience, you know, we send people out with the song.

Over the weekend, your friend Cam Kowski, my FY Pod co-host, his ex-girlfriend is a notable Olivia Rodrigo.

And she was at Lollapalooza and brought out Weezer to do a cover of Say It Ain't So, which was my favorite song in sixth grade.

And it was unbelievable.

And I got to tell you, Olivia is just, you know, she's 22.

She's a Zoomer, and she's doing everything possible to hook in the millennial girl dads to make sure that we indoctrinate our children into her music over Taylor Swift and the competitors.

And I got to tell you, it is working on me.

She absolutely annihilated Say It Ain't So at Lollapalooza.

So I'm going to take people out to that.

And I'll be back here tomorrow.

Pray for me, everybody.

Speaking of being a girl dad, I'm going to Universal with two girls, two seven-year-olds today.

We'll see how it goes.

Got one more pod from California tomorrow, and then I'll be back home.

Appreciate everybody for listening every day.

Bill Crystal doesn't, but so I appreciate you if you do.

We'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast.

Peace.

Oh, yeah.

Alright,

it feels good

inside.

Rip on the chilly,

wrestle with Jimmy.

Something is bubbling

behind my back.

The bottle is ready

to blow.

Take it, take it.

The joy

is a heartbreaker.

My love

is a lifetaker.

Yeah.

I can't confront you

I never could do

I bitch might hurt you

to try and think through

what you say

This way

is a water slide away from breathing takes you through the river every day

to be cool,

yeah.

You say it is so above

your trouble is a heartbreaker.

You say it is so old.

My love

is a lifetime.

Hey, Tara, I'll write you.

Spot up here's the silence.

You couldn't have got chooser, Kings are good, or so I can.

This model of Stevens awakens into

feelings.

Like father, stepfather,

the sun is dying in the blood.

Yeah, yeah,

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

The next era of true religion is here, introducing the 2025 Icons Collection, and it's coming in hot with Glorilla and Duke Dennis.

She owns the stage, he owns the stream.

Together, they define what it means to be individually iconic.

Now it's your turn.

Every look is stitched with with that OG true attitude and confidence.

This drop isn't just about what you wear, it's about how you show up.

It's real and bold, just like you.

Own the spotlight.

Own your true.

Shop the collection available now at true religion.com.

Top reasons your career wants you to move to Ohio.

So many amazing growth opportunities, high-paying jobs and technology, advanced manufacturing, engineering, life sciences, and more.

You'll soar to new heights, just like the Wright brothers, John Glenn, even Neil Armstrong.

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A job that can take you further and a place you can't wait to come home to.

Have it all in the heart of it all.

Launch your search at callohiohome.com.

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That's paycorp.com/slash leaders.