Bill Kristol: Has Trump Trapped Himself?

57m
With the Epstein case, the conspirator-in-chief has finally found a hoax that MAGA isn't buying—and he's risking his credibility among his newer supporters in the manosphere by continuing to hawk it. Meanwhile, Trump may have figured out that Putin has not been nice to him. Plus, troops are still in Los Angeles, immigration laws meant for the border are being applied to gardeners and farmworkers in the country's interior, and there's a big serving of fascism that goes with all the clownishness.



Bill Kristol joins Tim Miller.

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

I'm lightly tanned, unrested, unready,

but I'm going to make it through on some Oasis endorphins.

And it's Monday, so I'm here with Bill Crystal, who can carry me on a post-vacation hangover.

How are you doing, Bill?

I'm fine.

How was your vacation, Tim?

How was Oasis?

Oasis was so incredible.

It was biblical, as they say.

Mad for it.

It was really something.

They were on a 16-year hiatus.

We were in their hometown of Manchester.

Very few Yanks there.

As soon as I opened up.

Manchester, England, not Manchester, New England.

Some of us are very parochial.

I spent a lot of time in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Let me tell you.

I can tell you about the bar scene there.

It's pretty rough.

It was my first time in Manchester, England, which has kind of like a British Detroit feel to it.

One of those working, you know, industrial towns.

It's kind of being revitalized.

And we were out in their big city park, Keaton Park, and 80,000 people.

All these Lime's knew every word to every song, the B-sides, everything.

They came out.

And

I had British strangers hugging me.

It was really quite the experience going to see the Oasis Reunion in Manchester.

So that was good.

Madrid was great.

Amsterdam, going from the Spanish to the British with the Dutch in between, I felt like I was whispering the whole time in Amsterdam.

Like

it's one of the most much more modest people in Amsterdam.

But it was wonderful.

I have to warn the audience, it might be a two-week vacation next year.

I could have done a couple more days, but it was really good.

How are things here?

Well, it was tough without you.

We held down the fort.

Actually, we seem to have done pretty well.

I did the podcast with our friend Cam Caskey there in your absence, and I went pretty well.

Has he talked to you guys?

Yeah, I was worried about the fact that the fact that you're going to be moved aside a bit, and it's going to be, you know, the grandfather relationship is really good with the 24-year-old.

One of the original name ideas, one I still kind of like the best, frankly, for FY Pod, was Boomer Zoomer.

And so you could just move me out and have it officially be Boomer Zoomer.

It's your, you and he, you and he have a lot to talk about, but like Oasis.

I called him like an older brother on the way to the airport, and I was like, I'm not going to have my vacation fucking screwed up because

you do something crazy.

so behave.

So I'm glad to hear it worked.

He behaved.

And then we had an interesting week in politics, culminating with Epstein this past weekend.

And Oasis sounds great.

Yeah, I don't know much about Oasis.

I don't really hugging strangers.

You're in a Wonder Wall.

Hugging strangers, hugging strangers at some big, in a big event.

I don't know.

I'm not really big on that.

Last time I think I hugged a stranger was in Fenway Park in 1975 when Carlin Fisk hit the walk-off home run in the 12th inning of the sixth game.

The greatest moment I've ever seen in baseball.

and uh everyone in fenway park was hugging each other so that's my oasis you know my oasis is is the world series 50 years ago noel walking back out uh in the to the hometown telling them that don't don't look back in anger is up next was kind of like the carlton fisk i think of uh of the moment so uh it's great it's great that you had a good time folks can yeah look at my instagram if they want to just see me in pure bliss but uh now

not Not as pure bliss, I guess.

Though we had some good things happened, it seems like.

Well, actually, let me ask you, what did I miss the most?

I did this.

I read nothing.

I read nothing.

Anytime I would receive a text from someone about something and I would admonish them to not

follow up.

I didn't want any more information.

I was essentially totally black with a few bad apples like Tommy Vitor texting me.

And other than that,

I was black.

So what did I miss?

What was the most important thing, I think, that happened?

That's a good question.

I don't know.

There was a lot of news.

I have to go back and look at Morning Jean's to see what we all covered.

I mean, Epstein Epstein took it over beginning around a little bit Sunday, which was right after you left with the release of the Joint Justice Department FBI statement.

But then when Trump butted into a question on Tuesday at the cabinet meeting and took the question that was intended for Bondi, really, and said, oh, why does everyone care about Epstein?

It's so ridiculous.

He's a dead guy.

I mean, that did drive the mega base.

crazy.

And then a lot of people, and I'd include myself in this, said, you know what?

What is going on here?

And is there like a reason why we don't know a little more about what this horrendous, grotesque, horrible sex criminal did over years?

And he was a friend of Trump's, and we could talk more about that.

Sarah and I did this little podcast on Saturday afternoon, kind of last minute.

Absolutely was in the news.

We both had opinions about it, which were that it was a legitimate issue, basically.

But neither of us had followed it at all closely.

We're not really into conspiracy theories.

So we did this 20-minute thing, no.

you know, not on a regular slot or anything like that, obviously.

Saturday afternoon, I just looked at it this morning.

It seems to have gotten over half a million views.

Honestly, it was fine.

It was fine, but it wasn't like scintillating, brilliant, hilarious, you know, insightful,

nothing you could

not know otherwise.

And then I did this thing with Julie Brown, the really fantastic reporter who broke the story again and forced, in a way, the second indictment of Epstein in 2019, which wrote these pieces for the Miami Herald in 2018.

And that's gotten also a lot of attention.

And what that tells me is these are not MAGA people, I'm going to guess, watching the Woolworth, watching me and Sarah, right?

Our people, if I could put it this way, are interested in it.

It is a very interesting, horrible in many ways, of course, but I mean, interesting story about many things, our criminal justice system, our elites, Trump, New York financiers, unfortunately, sex trafficking.

So anyway, I'm now slightly obsessed with Epstein.

Okay, great.

I've been there for a while.

So I was happy.

Is that right?

Oh, good for you.

Yeah, it's nice you had an eight-day catch-up.

I did a Julie Brown interview.

She is great.

And I was happy you did the Sunday show.

We did it back when I was doing the next level Sunday interviews, which feels like a lifetime ago.

So it must have been two or three years ago.

And I'll put a link to the show notes.

There's something weird here still.

And

I was like, you, I hadn't been paying that close of attention to it.

And I was like, I want you to educate me, basically.

And so it was long form, kind of went into the origin story.

She talked about the victims a lot.

And we talked a little bit about the Trump of it at the time.

So if people are just catching up and want to kind of get that backstory, Julie K.

Brown has been the reporter on this.

I'll put the link in the in the notes here.

But you know, the Trump part of it has continued to nag at me for a while because mostly, I mean, partly because of the troll, but also just because of the,

it is pretty wild.

I mean, like, the coincidences are pretty extreme.

And the death,

suicide, if you will, did happen when Trump was president.

And so I was more obsessed with like kind of the meta narrative about this.

Like, how did this become a right-wing coded conspiracy theory?

Like, Trump was friends with the guy, Acosta, who was in his cabinet, gave him the sweetheart deal initially.

He died under the Bill Barr Justice Department.

There are also some Bill Barr connections to Epstein.

Maybe there's nothing here, but if there is something here, it's related to Trump.

The comparison I have now to this situation that I'm wondering

how you'll react to this is that it's a little reminiscent of the Harriet Myers thing from

the beginning of the Bush second term, where you and maybe it's just the laura ingram clip i'm about to play you because i remember laura ingram being very going very hard against bush in term two over the harriet myers thing and you know essentially the right-wing media kind of asserting itself and saying that he'd gone soft trump has never experienced that and he's experiencing this now we are in day eight since that memo came out here's a little audio mashup i put together from uh the turning point usa festival this weekend that includes laura Ingram and Dave Smith and Charlie Kirk and some others.

Let's just take a listen.

I will not rest until we go full Jan 6 committee on the Jeffrey Epstein files and every single client

that was associated with this thing has an FBI agent at their door on their phone going after them the same way they went after the Jan 6ers and the peaceful patriots and the praying grandmothers that were on those steps.

That's how we should go after every single person that was in

the client list.

How many of you are satisfied

you can clap?

Satisfied with the results of the Epstein investigation?

Clap.

Okay, I told you to clap.

You guys aren't listening.

I'm not going to grade you on a curve.

So I was going to get to that.

How many of you are not satisfied with the results of the investigation?

I think the DOJ should immediately move to unseal all the Epstein documents in the Southern District of New York.

Yeah.

Everything.

Listen, guys, I'm a free American.

I supported Donald Trump in this last election.

Yes, he did just actively cover up a giant child rapist ring, and I'm going to criticize him for that, okay?

I mean, the crowd reaction is notable.

It is striking.

So, I mean, I think people like me, I won't say,

probably didn't pay as much attention to this once it became such a part of MAGA world conspiracy theories.

How that happened, I agree, given that Trump is the guy who was so friendly with Epstein, there's all the video, Trump praised him in 2002, et cetera.

How that happened, maybe it has to do with QAnon and they were so obsessed with the massive pedophile activity at the highest levels of the U.S.

government and Pizzagate and all.

And once Epstein re-emerges, thanks to Julie Brown, who is not a MAGA type, but thanks to her really courageous reporting and indefatigable reporting against many obstacles, incidentally.

And he gets reindicted, recharged into 2019, and then dies.

And then Maxwell's charged in 2021, I think, and convicted.

Somehow that was fine, but that was different from the MAGA world obsession with it, which I do think was, don't you think QAnon related?

Yeah, I mean, obviously, that there was a tie between the kind of QAnon element of this and that Trump was the one stopping the pedophile rings and the he'll end up Pizzagate, you know.

And then Biden's president and nothing, do they indict Epstein or nothing which happens?

And that's and then and Maxwell.

And Maxwell.

I mean, I'm sorry, they indict Maxwell, not Epstein, and Epstein's dead at this point, and

convict her.

But I will say this, just now that I've looked at it and talked to Julie especially,

I don't know, if you have a massive, I kind of, whoever was on that audio, if you have a massive conspiracy, two people get charged.

I mean, are they the only people who knew what was going on or the only people who helped make it happen?

There was money sloshing around.

There were arrangements being made, galore.

Now, not every person who, I don't know, flew Epstein's plane necessarily knew what it was for, and maybe said you wouldn't go necessarily charge all those people, but there are a heck of a lot of middle-level, upper-middle management people in this conspiracy, as there are in others.

Incidentally, you think about Madoff, think about these others.

My impression is, I haven't researched this honestly, but more than one person gets charged in these cases.

Sometimes they turn state's evidence, maybe they don't get punished as severely, but they're just kind of, you know, didn't quite understand what was happening, maybe.

But anyway, a lot of of that didn't come out.

And the original deal in 2008 was a total disgrace.

So, and so the notion that the elites took care of themselves, the elites didn't want this rock to turn over this rock too much.

They reluctantly went after him.

I think how reluctant it was, they went after this repulsive creep.

They give him a plea deal in 08.

By 06, I think they felt they couldn't ignore it.

There was so much talk about it.

They give him a plea deal in 08.

Julie Brown personally gets them to finally indict him again 10 years later.

He dies, and then they do Maxwell.

They get her convicted, and then it's all just dropped.

And I don't know, maybe all these guys didn't know.

They didn't know how old the girls were.

They didn't realize they were being sex trafficked.

They just thought this was kind of a thing that happens in elite circles in New York and Palm Beach.

It's minimally, unbelievably, well, creepy is not even the word.

I mean, just horrible.

And hard to believe there were charges that could have been.

brought against those people.

Now, maybe they couldn't prove them.

It's whatever, prosecutorial judgments.

Maybe.

So that's one side.

So I think what's happened is you want the Harriet Myers analogy?

The right turned on Myers because they thought she was a squish sort of on abortion and other issues.

People like me and David Frum criticized Myers a lot, and I think probably made it more legitimate in a sense for some of the more moderate Republican senators to say, we're not going along with this, because we just thought she wasn't up to the position.

It wasn't appropriate, for instance, as a Supreme Court nominee.

And so the equivalent I'd say was this, is Magus going after Trump, which causes trouble in Trump's base, which is good politically.

But also, I do think a lot of people, I'll say this about myself, you know, have sort of been reawakened to just how much of an outrage the whole thing is.

And then the Justice Department, it's Trump's Justice Department, so we should stipulate that.

I'll come back to that in a sec.

But the Justice Department of the United States puts out a one and a half page statement with the FBI that just says that nothing to see here.

It doesn't explain.

I mean, I was thinking about this.

Comey and Tillary.

Let's go back to emails for a minute.

So he decided not to prosecute.

But you know what?

It was a big story.

It was a big concern.

And he put out a statement.

He had a press conference.

He explained.

People didn't like the explanation.

They did like it, whatever.

But I mean, it was like they felt some obligation to explain to the public why they were doing a certain set of things in this very controversial and a case that had a lot of attention.

Nothing of that here.

So even if it weren't the Trump Justice Department, it's kind of bad, I think.

And of course, Trump was a very good friend of Epstein.

We have...

a lot of evidence of that.

I mean, they both say it, so there's not even, he's in the files.

We know that.

He's in the airplane logs already.

We've seen that.

He's got to be in the files.

I mean, he was close to Epsilon.

How could he have not come up in a bunch of interviews?

Should they put out unredacted, unvetted files?

Well, if some person says, I hear Donald did that, no, that's not right.

Obviously, the criminal investigation is a million things that shouldn't be shared.

But he is the president of the United States.

Should there be some account of

his involvement or not involvement?

Maybe

that would be worth knowing.

And finally, while you were gone, there was all this publicity about Bongino.

Is that how we've pressed it?

it?

And I was the Attorney General Pam Bandi and Cash Patel.

They're fighting.

They're unhappy.

Bongino's unhappy.

Bondi's taking the hit and all this.

It's all ludicrous.

This is the one thing Sarah and I really both, I think, independently came to as we talked about it Wednesday or Thursday and thought, this is ridiculous.

It's Trump.

Pam Bandi is not deciding how to handle the Epstein files without consulting Trump.

Maybe she's careful and doesn't formally schedule a meeting with him and there's an indirect communication.

Trump's kind of good at that kind of stuff.

It is inconceivable that Trump didn't sign off on these things, maybe order the decisions that Bondi and Patel came to.

And anyway, they believe in the unitary executive, so he's responsible for it.

I mean, he is literally responsible for it, right?

Just the way, you know, he doesn't get to walk, you know, to say, oh, that's Bondi and Patel.

I don't know anything about it.

So Trump decided to slam the door shut on the files of this sexual predator whom he was a good friend of.

and who is probably mentioned in many of these files.

That's kind of a big story.

And depending on what you, it's a really big story.

And depending on what also you mean by files, like

there are other Trump accusers.

So, and Julie points this out, right?

It's not like there's just one secret black book where he listed all of the men that raped women, right?

Like, the files encompass all the investigations, the videos.

You know, they like they went into Epstein's home and took out a lot of tapes.

We don't, people don't know what's on what is on the tapes.

You know, there are other accusers.

It was Stacey Williams, I believe, that accused Trump of groping her in an Epstein-involved situation.

There's another woman who did as well attached to Epstein, the Michael Wolf book.

Now, I'm a little kind of iffy on Michael Wolf, but like he says that Epstein showed him pictures of women on Trump's lap, topless women, were they underage?

I don't, you know, I don't know.

So the point is that like any legitimate investigation into Epstein would have included like running down these types of accusations.

And so he would be in there at some level.

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I want to talk about why I think that this like has, I don't want to, you know, get over excited that this is going to be the thing that breaks MAG or whatever, but I want to talk a little bit about what the real risks are with MAG in a second.

But since you brought up Bon Gino, that first, he took a mental health day on Friday.

He took the day off and apparently reported that he has gotten a screaming match with Susie Wiles.

CNN over the weekend says that he's told multiple people he's considering resigning over this.

Who knows, right?

Is that a face-saving thing?

Is that Bongino doesn't like having a real job?

Is it that Bongino doesn't like how it was handled?

That he knows something.

But again, that brings legitimacy.

Like that is a real news item.

Like the deputy director of the FBI, Trump named him the deputy director of the FBI.

He might be a clown, but like it's a pretty, it would be a pretty major story in any administration if the deputy director of the FBI was like, I'm going to resign because I think that my boss is covering up a pedophile ring.

Totally.

That's very well said.

And I really, I just want to emphasize that point.

I mean, it's the idea that this is, oh, we should, I was on a various conversations over the weekend.

I want to bore you with them and, you know, various liberal friends in Washington and elites and lawyers and so forth types.

And they were like very abashed about even discussing it.

I don't know, Bill, is that really a thing?

I said I was doing the podcast with Julie Brown, Sarah and I had done one and stuff, and I was just going to write something about it this morning.

I thought it was like, oh, this is not kind of, I guess you have to.

It's probably hurts them politically, but you know, it's kind of, we got more important things to talk about and all this.

The deputy director of the FBI, as you say, Trump's personally hand-picked appointee, possibly quitting the administration five months in over a cover-up that Bongino will say is Pamboni's, but must therefore be Donald Trump's.

That's a very big story, right?

It doesn't take away Trump.

Trump.

That's a story in any administration.

I couldn't agree more.

So it really is absolutely legitimate to cover.

And since the Bongino reporting is so broad-based now, and in fact, half of it's by people whom Bongino is probably telling it to, right?

Laura Loomer.

I mean, who's the source for Laura Loomer?

What are the guys?

You know, you follow some of these MAGA characters a little more closely than I do.

Do we not think that Bongino is personally the source for Laura Loomer, like a 75% chance of that?

I don't know.

I mean, so it's not like this is just third-hand, disreputable, gossipy stuff.

Clearly, as you said, he took that day off.

He's very unhappy.

So that's a story.

I absolutely agree.

Here's like also, I think, the big picture political element to this that relates to that turning point USA video and the response of the crowd, relates to kind of the response from the manosphere.

We've seen some of this from some of these less political, less guys that jumped on board the Trump train that did care about the Epstein issue.

Like

given what has happened, like they put out this statement that says that there's nothing there.

Like the implication of that is one of two things.

Either essentially all of the deep state conspiracies are fake.

If there's really nothing to the Epstein case, then there's nothing to any of the cases that

they have gotten all excited about that has driven MAGA media for years.

Or Trump is covering up.

pedophilia on behalf of the most influential people in the world, including himself.

Like that's kind of it.

Like if there's nothing here, like those are the options.

Like you either take it at face value, there's nothing there and that all of these conspiracies that you've been spending all this podcast time in over the years amounts to nothing, or Trump is involved in a massive cover-up on behalf of the elites.

And I think that, like, the first one is important

because when you think about the risk to MAGA, you know, because I think that probably a lot of liberals would just default to the first one, which is probably the first one, right?

Like, it's probably just that these guys are all a bunch of conspiracy theorists and there's nothing there but but there

will be a reckoning for that if that is true on the right like if you take what they've been told at face value in mega world like and you look at the pambondi cash patel record so far there have been no arrests of the biden crime family no arrests over 2020 election fraud no arrests over the russia hooks

No arrests involved with Jeffrey Epstein.

How could that be acceptable to these people?

I don't understand.

I don't think it is.

And I think that you will see the backlash.

And I think that they are almost as vulnerable to delivering nothing as they are to a cover-up.

I mean, obviously, covering up Donald Trump being complicit in this would be a bigger story, but I think it's a real political vulnerability.

You know, I think Trump senses that, which is why in that kind of insane, long truth social post of 5 p.m.

on a Saturday afternoon, he turns it in a way which is both crazy, but in a way consistent with what you're saying.

This was invented by Obama and Clinton.

And I mean, he goes on, right?

The document almost seems to say.

I have it in front of me.

Let me just read it real quick.

What's going on with my boys?

And in some cases, gals?

They're all going after Pam Bondi, who's doing a fantastic job.

We have a perfect administration, the talk of the world, and selfish people are trying to hurt it all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.

For years, it's Epstein over and over again.

Why are we giving publicity to files written by Obama, crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration who conned the world with Russia, Russia, Russia, the laptop from hell, and more, blah, blah, blah.

So like, that's what he's trying to lump it in with.

Which is literally almost crazy.

That is six days before his own Justice Department and FBI in a statement that, as I said, must have been signed off on by him.

I've said, look, we've gone through all the, I hadn't really realized till I read this statement personally.

They go into a little bit of detail, not much, but a couple of paragraphs.

We've gone through all these files, all these videos, extensive.

Many agents and investigators have looked into this.

Who knows if they're telling the truth, but they say they went through all this stuff.

They say nothing about the files being cooked up or invented by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or anything like that.

And they say, but there was nothing there.

There's not enough there.

There's no conspiracy.

There's nothing to charge, not even no conspiracy.

It would be inappropriate to release any new information.

That's what they say.

But the files are legit.

Suddenly, Trump, realizing that he's got the problem that you sort of specified, which is, well, wait a second, if the files are legit,

okay, well, let's hear something about them.

The files are made up, which is, in a way, typical Trump, kind of shrewdly just trying to totally change the topic so he doesn't even have to address it.

And he denies everything, right?

He denies story dangles.

He denies everything that he's guilty that he did.

Basically, he's unashamed about lying, to say the least.

But in this case, he's now gotten himself into sort of weird contradiction.

I mean, none of his people believes these files were made up.

None of MAGA world thinks the files were made up.

It shows a kind of panic, in my view, that 5.21 p.m.

long truth social post that you read some of on Saturday afternoon.

That feels to me like a little realization that this is spinning out of control.

I don't know when those that booing was.

Yeah, same time.

It was around the same time.

Yeah, you know, he's hearing about this and he's sort of, I'll go to my go-to play.

It's all invented by Obama and Hillary as a decoy.

But these people have been talking about this for years, and no one said it was invented, including Patel, Bondi, or Trump himself.

No one said this problem was invented by Hillary or Obama, right?

I mean, that would be consistent if they said other things, you know what I mean?

The Russia hoax is the consistent fake news item on Trump's part, right?

It was invented by Mueller and Obama, and now it's been invented eight years later.

But so what's he going to do?

I mean, I think what he'll do is, and he says this sort of at the end of that long truth social thing, he's going to go after, redouble his efforts to go after everyone he can go after.

Forget about Epstein, but I'm indicting, you know, Comey, I'm indicting, God knows, I'm reopening the Hillary investigation, I'm reopening this, he'll come after the Bulwark.

I don't know.

I mean, he'll desperately try to get his people focused on the malefactors who, you know, he wants them focused on.

But that's difficult in this case.

This was, as you say, 2019 was under Trump.

2000, he didn't complain.

You know what I mean?

Trump wasn't complaining about the settlement in 2008,

so far as I know, under the Bush administration.

So anyway.

I think that's a sell that works for

the news max watchers.

If you're a 70-year-old MAGA person who leaves OAN on all day long, like, sure, like whatever is going to work on you.

Like, Like, eventually, Charlie Kirk will get in line, you know, on side, right?

Like, Fox primetime eventually gets on side, right?

Like, you can only talk about this for so long, probably.

But

that nexus of people that were drawn to Trump because he felt like he was a finger, tiny little finger, in the eye of the elites, you know, and that that's what they liked about him, that he was anti-establishment, he was different, that he, you know, wasn't going to get us involved in the wars.

Like you hear that from like the young men that got along with him.

I think that the credibility is unrecoverable on this.

Like these guys are wired to believe that there is a conspiracy, whether or not that there is.

You know, like the idea that you can tell them that the Jeffrey Epstein thing was just nothing, actually,

is just laughable.

I don't think the credibility is recoverable with them, which is meaningful.

It's so evidently more something than all these other quote conspiracies.

I mean, actually, Absolutely was not a conspiracy theory, exactly.

It was a criminal case.

He pled guilty in 08.

They gave him a very soft punishment.

It was reopened, as we've discussed.

They indicted him.

Those documents are public.

I actually saw them.

I just looked at it this morning.

So it's not a kind of pizza gate.

Oh, my God, the deep state.

They weren't covering it.

They indicted him.

Then they indicted.

The suicide part is Maxwell.

Yeah, the suicide part is like, I guess, the conspiracy to

that he didn't really kill himself.

But then again, they released the video.

There's like a one-minute gap.

It's like, why is there a one-minute gap?

And then again, on stage, and this is how you end up eating your own young.

On stage, it was not one of the clips I played, but at TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, even Kirk is like,

can you just tell us who else was on the floor?

Right?

It's like, you know what I mean?

Like, what other prisoners were on the floor?

So we can like look to see if any of them might have connections or,

you know,

you start putting the pins against the wall with this, with the string.

But I mean, I think that that part of it, you know, is, I guess, the quote-unquote conspiracy.

But also,

it is odd.

It's unusual.

Raises some eyebrows.

What do you think about the sort of the soft Trump supporters?

I guess they can just, the world's, I'd be interested to see what the Wall Street Journal says and stuff.

I mean, will they just sort of dismiss it?

Harrietton reported on CNN.

I don't know how reliable a thing this is, that an indicator this is.

I assume what he said is true.

There's a wild surge in Google searches for Trump at Epstein.

And I take it that sort of feels to me like us getting half a million views out of Sarah for this 20-minute video.

Let's say normal people, not necessarily maybe Trump supporters, but not MAGA world.

They're not, you know, are just like, well, what is the story here?

What are the facts?

And the more people get to a sort of Julie Brown level, obviously not exactly at her level, but a simplified version of a Julie Brown level of understanding, well, what happened over these 20 years?

Or what happened over the 15 years before that when Trump and Epstein were great buddies?

And, you know, what is the real story?

I think that hurts him in a slightly different way from the way you're describing with MAGA World, but in an additional way.

It's sort of like the Meyers thing.

It hurts him.

The bass didn't like it because she wasn't fervent enough.

And like legal, you know, scholar types sort of thought, I thought he was going to like, I thought the new conservative legal originalism was John Roberts and it was serious people, you know, and it both can hurt, right?

All right.

Well, we'll, we'll continue to monitor.

I feel pretty happy.

I'm kind of giddy and vindicated about the whole thing because I was so fucking annoyed the whole time that I was like,

how is this a right-wing conspiracy?

It's like, if anybody killed this fucking guy, it's Bill Baar and Trump.

I don't know if anybody did.

Maybe he killed himself, but it's certainly not Hillary Clinton.

How was she going to do it from Chappaqua walking through the woods?

I mean, good for you for being on this earlier.

And I think it is.

It is important.

I mean, one point that Julie made, and I want to also just

victims here do deserve a word of, you know, concern and God knows sympathy and and justice yeah some justice at least in so far as they can get justice for what happened to them terrible things that were done it never even occurs to trump to say that i was very struck by that you know or really to bondi or patel they have one half sentence in that two-page memo that's sort of about doing justice to the victims but in their actual statements in their tweets there's nothing about that and that's somehow to me very very revealing.

Trump went out of his way to say he wished Maxwell well when she was arrested in 2020.

Remember that from the White House podium.

Yeah.

But he's never said anything about the victims.

What does that say about Trump?

Trump thinks about it as, I knew Jeffrey.

He was a good friend.

Maybe I had a falling out with him, whatever.

I'm sort of involved.

Other people I know could well be involved, other Trump donors, other God knows who else, right?

I mean, in those circles.

And we got to keep the lid on this.

And there's not a moment of thought that there were hundreds, maybe a thousand or something like that, underage girls who were victims of this monster.

Yeah, it's horrible.

Yeah, I talked to Julie a lot about the victims during that first combo because it was a little bit outside of like kind of a political frame.

We did a little politics.

So again, people can go can go listen to that because her stories are really

just

astonishing and tough to listen to, important to listen to.

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Where do we want to go next?

I have I have a series of other things that have been happening.

I guess I want to start with immigration.

While I was gone in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, so I come back last night and I'm like, all right, I'm going to start reading about what the fuck happened this past week.

And this story, I forget, you know, I'm like going through different newsletters and, you know, going through the old morning shots and all acting, and reading through what happened.

I was reading this one and I clicked on the PBS story.

Dozens of federal officers in tactical gear and about 90 members of the California National Guard were deployed for about an hour Monday to a mostly empty park in a Los Angeles neighborhood with a large immigrant population.

Mayor Karen Bass, who we subsequently did an interview with about this, what I saw in the park looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation.

I was reading that story and I was like, wait, the military is still in Los Angeles?

Like, why is the fucking military still in Los Angeles?

And this morning, as I was trying to get to catch up, I was like,

what have they been doing for the last week?

It is truly crazy that the federal government is still taking control of the California National Guard and has deployed Marines to Los Angeles to just hassle people.

Right.

I think they were supporting the Border Patrol people who

were

proudly riding through on horses.

It was so third world and so horrible to see.

I mean, certainly Los Angeles is not on the border.

So we have the Border Patrol plus the National Guard in a park in L.A.

where kids literally, it was a Monday, were like there for, you know, their camp.

They go to the park to play soccer or something like that.

I mean, that's who was there.

I mean, it really brought home the kind of semi-fascism of the whole thing, honestly.

It brought home, I think, the warnings of some of us that this wasn't going to stop once they began this deportation.

The deportation thing just accelerates, right?

And your point is so good about the Guard and the Marines.

I think Toronto Marines are now being sent to Florida to help out with that.

horrible camp in the in the Everglades or to help, I don't know what, protect the ICE people, not that they're being attacked.

They're picking up 70-year-old people.

You know, I mean, remember, we all, I will say on this, called attention to this.

That original executive order, the original justification was all open-ended.

It wasn't only for LA.

It wasn't only for California.

It was for any troops he needs, wherever there could be a problem, wherever they had intelligence, there might be protests.

I mean, Miller laid the groundwork for this, and they're going ahead with it.

Now, there is a pretty big reaction, I would say.

You asked what you missed during the week.

A few people were like, a little, really?

This is not where we are?

Plus, there's some business reaction and farmers' reaction against all the harassing of hardworking people and a little more Trump voters saying over and over, this is a JVL obsession.

Of course, you know, I didn't vote for this, even though they had mass deportation, you know, printed up placards at the Republican Convention, but they didn't think they were voting for this, I suppose.

So anyway, that's.

Yeah, here's the thing, though.

So

there's this.

fascistic and scared.

Well, always with fascism, there is like a clownishness involved with it.

So like there's the clownish side of it, too.

Clint Clippenstein was reporting on that raid.

They, they gave it a name, Operation Excalibur.

Yeah.

And it was just like a totally botched laughingstock.

Like, he had some sources of the National Guard.

He's like, we were there for like 20 minutes.

Nobody knew what they were doing.

We all had different code names.

You know, it's like the Border Patrol is Pepsi and the Marines were Coke and ICE was A ⁇ W Rupee.

And it was like the whole thing was ridiculous.

Like it was just a farce.

You know, at some level, there's that.

But and like these errors are adding up.

Just like I was trying to clean up on a couple of the stories that I talked about.

This Narquiso Baranco, that was the father of the three U.S.

Marines that was violently tackled and beaten up in LA.

He is supposed to be released today.

Donna Kashani is the Iranian woman that was gardening here in New Orleans, had been here for 60 years.

She got released while I was gone after a couple of weeks.

Last night, this guy, George Redis, I don't know if I talked about him, but he was this disabled U.S.

veteran and U.S.

citizen that was like violently detained for several days in one of these raids.

He got released after about three days.

There's some other examples of this, but you see like the problem developing, right?

Which is that the Congress just

gave tens of billions of more dollars to ICE to go out and find and detain people.

They're having to hassle, you know, and harass and detain people that are not violent criminals or major risks like already before all those other resources.

So like, I mean, to me, that augurs very ominously for like what is coming down the pike.

And it seems like the best case scenario is that we just spend billions and billions of dollars to have a bunch of guys sit around with their thumbs up their ass, which might be what's happening right now in L.A.

I mean, that would be good, but they are deporting a lot of people.

They are way beyond capacity in terms of the current detention capacities, capabilities, and they're building, as in Florida with that Everglades thing, they're going to have now spend all this money to build many more detention centers and to spend money to get them out of the country, including now, because the courts have given them a sort of green light on this, to third countries where they have no relationship and don't even speak the language and the South Sudan thing.

So I'm pretty, Tom Homan, the

sort of miller deputy in effect on this, was like, we're going to preside over the largest mass deportation in history.

You can bet on it.

So I think the clownishness is real, as you said, it is characteristic of a lot of these kinds of movements, political movements.

But the

fascism is real too, if I can put it this way.

And I, they, yeah, I mean, will there be enough of a backlash that at some point Trump says, hey, I mean, this is getting a little out of hand.

It is pretty unpopular.

There was that one immigration poll that came out while you were gone.

Did you see that?

Where numbers have changed pretty radically across the board on immigration, actually, but presumably in reaction to this stuff, particularly in terms of your general views: are you favorable or well-disposed to immigrants or not?

And it's like shot way up.

And do you think we have too many of them?

Too little, too, too little has gone up, too many has gone way down.

So I don't know.

Does political reality hit at some point?

Or is this just, or is this the one thing they're going to do?

And they don't care.

And Homan and Miller are going to just, our friend Aaron Reich Melnick, we've both done podcasts with, said months ago, they're going to have trouble hiring all these people because here's how the procedure works.

And, you know, there's all kinds of qualifications and vetting.

But I mean, he did at the time said, of course, these procedures are kind of at their discretion.

I mean, I think Holman and Miller, they will hire every tough guy, thuggish guy, proud boy, you know, someone who got fired from a sheriff's department for beating up, you know, someone whose skin color he didn't like.

I mean, I hope not, but I very much worry that they'll be ICE agents six weeks from now.

And so I'm slightly on the side of being super alarmed about where this goes, not reassured that they kind of are going to screw it up so badly.

And Garrett Graff, who I might try to get on in the next couple of weeks, wrote about this.

He was covering this the last round.

And he covered essentially the story of like the CBP officers.

Like, there's a big

hiring spree back then when they were pretending to build a wall or whatever

on border agents.

And, you know, one of the things he came away from it is it's like it's a it's messy.

It's not like the FBI.

There's not like that kind of vetting system.

You know, they made some really bad mistakes, like they hired people that had criminal records and they hired people that weren't prepared for this.

And

that was small compared to what they're trying to do now.

Just one more thing on the Everglades.

Because it's in America, not in El Salvador, some Democratic members of Congress have been able to get in there.

And, you know, I was watching Debbie Wasserman Schultz's press conference talking about it, talking about how the conditions are very poor.

And Maxwell Frost was echoing that.

The Miami Herald got the files of who is in the

Everglades detention center.

Hundreds of immigrants with no criminal charges are being held there.

You know, maybe about a third of them have no criminal charges or 260 with pending criminal charges, 240 with criminal convictions.

So it's like, are there bad people that are being caught?

Yes, great.

But like, does the manner in which they're doing this mean that like we are holding people who did, who have done essentially nothing in like in cages and making them like lay next to violent criminals and shower next to them and eat you know like yeah like that like both are happening and i mean i don't know enough about the law about exactly i mean obviously at the border it's a different situation than internally but you can't arrest people and just hold them indefinitely in the united states of america at least i didn't think you could and you can't normally and the new york city police department can't and they can hold you 48 hours and you call your lawyer and if they don't have charges with witnesses and the whole apparatus of a legal system you get you leave and you can also get bail.

I mean, none of this here, right?

They just hold them.

And I guess at some point they're going to ship them out based on their own determination.

I mean, there's some provision for some legal help sometimes, it seems like, but they've taken laws that really were designed for the border, right?

Someone sneaks across, he's half a mile across.

They're not going to have a, we're not going to have a whole U.S.-style apparatus before we send that guy back to Mexico, right?

I mean,

that would be crazy and impractical.

But they're taking those kinds of rules and applying it to people who are gardeners.

in Florida or in California.

It's really terrible.

I mean, in that respect, the corruption it's doing to the country.

I mean, mean, I feel bad for the people, obviously, who are being detained above all, but the general corruption to the notion of the rule of law and all that is quite great as well.

Michael Tomaski pointed this out.

I think potentially there's some political opportunity here for Democrats because, yeah, I mean, the poll numbers have changed in immigration, but there, you know, maintains, you know, I think wrong-headed concern among some Democrats about like whether this is a good issue and maybe they should stay away from immigration as much.

But he framed it in a way that that I think is interesting that might allow some Democrats to get into this issue on a more

comfortable and favorable turf.

In 2023, the federal government spent $12.8 billion to build new affordable housing for people.

And the bill that passed a week and a half ago now has $45 billion on detention centers.

So when you think about the most fundamental issue that people have concerns about, like housing costs, cost of living in this country, the government is prioritizing by about 4x,

you know, putting immigrants in detention centers what they are prioritizing on providing housing for people.

Like that kind of stuff, I think, really can resonate

and get you into kind of the more economic side of this stuff.

Especially when there's so many stories about the people who are in these centers, as you say, have no criminal record or trivial, you know, one driving offense kind of record and literally are working, you know, are being hired on their way to jobs or having checked in as they are supposed to do legally to update their status each month or, you know, whatever, right?

It's one thing if, I mean, if you told people you've got to spend $40 billion because there's so many violent criminals in this country, it's the only way to keep us safe, they'd say, okay, you know, it's expensive to have, you know, law and order.

But that's not the case here.

So I think the combination is probably pretty.

effective.

Even Drew, even in that situation, it's like, do you want to live in a country where you're spending four times as much on prisons as you are on housing for people?

And all of a sudden, I'm about to start sounding like a democratic socialist over here.

But I do think that there are

economic populist way to get into this.

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The floods in Texas, also horrible.

I've got more to come on this with some guests coming later in the week and maybe next week over kind of what's happening with FEMA and what's, you know, happening with the cuts to the National Weather Service and what is ahead.

But just kind of a brief word, like A, just the tragedy.

And again, like the resource allocation questions like we we've got you know a soldier standing outside the federal building in los angeles guarding nothing and you know meanwhile there are people dying in kern county and texas because of these floods you would think that maybe there'd be a better way to allocate resources but um it seems to me just to be a pretty real failure, particularly with the Texas local government, which is kind of the point in these sort of situations.

But I don't know if there was anything that struck you about Texas.

No, I agree.

And it does seem like it was true that FEMA was slow getting there because Christine Ombud insisted that she sign off personally on every $100,000 expenditure or something.

And in fact, when FEMA really goes to a place, they always spend a fair amount of money getting people there.

Obviously, they got to buy plane tickets.

And so

I don't know.

There's been a lot of contradictory reporting, and correctly, people are more focused on the horrible tragedy for now.

But it seems like neither the federal government nor the Texas government, state government have distinguished themselves in this, unfortunately.

Yeah, more to come on this.

I want to talk with you about trade stuff.

So,

you know, Trump now, after tacoing and untacoing a million times, is now it's now August 1st is the big day on the reciprocal tariffs

for Europe.

I'm just reading a big kind of New York Times takeout of this about how the EU is still negotiating and drawing up, you know, any retaliation that they're going to do.

But really, more are just, you know, trying to reorient the trade map and the plans and figure out how they can kind of move forward without having to deal with

the mad king in America when it comes to economic deals.

And so you have that on the EU side of things.

And then we have decided to have a tantrum and put a 50% tariff on Brazil because Trump doesn't like the treatment of Bolsonaro.

I've got a pretty hilarious clip of Kevin Hassett trying to defend that that I want to play in here in a second.

But do you have any big, big picture thoughts on the latest on the trade side of things before I do?

I mean, it's pretty bad.

And somehow the markets have held up and the economy's mostly held up.

But you do wonder, I don't know, people I trust who are sensible economists and not even

fantastically anti-Trump necessarily, just think this he's the risk is getting greater and greater.

And I guess if you think ahead politically, if you combine some of what we've seen on Epstein and some of what we've seen on immigration with some real faltering in the economy, the housing starts also down a lot.

Some of this is immigration-related incidentally.

I don't know.

I feel like, yeah, they could be heading for a rough time here politically because of that.

Yeah, the economic thing is hard to kind of figure, right?

Because, you know, there are a lot of mixed signals.

The market has been resilient.

The U.S.

economy is big and dynamic and complex.

And right?

And it's like, you know, you have these little pockets of areas where you're seeing negative signs.

New people come out of college, new hiring is tough right now, certain industries, right?

But not like right after the Liberation Day where there were signs that maybe there was going to be a widespread economic downturn.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: I mean, trade is something like, what, 12% of the U.S.

GDP?

I mean, these things, they're slightly overhyped in a way.

How would just destroy everything overnight?

We can trade a lot with some of these countries.

It's not going to matter much.

On the other hand, it does add up.

Supply chain,

what do I know?

But I feel like people I think who are sensible are much more.

bearish for three, six, nine months from now.

It is, we're such a big economy.

We had pretty good momentum coming out of the Biden years, if I'm allowed to say that.

We're not to get into the phrasing.

We should forget about Biden coming out of the previous administration, you know,

that Trump was able to coast on that for a while.

But I got to think all this is doing real damage.

Your old friend, Kevin Hassett, I do just have to play a little bit from, he's on TV.

For folks who don't know Hassett, he was, I guess, an economist in good standing, maybe a little hackish during the Bush years, but

fully went in with MAGA and, you know, the more, whatever you want to call this, protectionist economic plan.

He was on with John Carl, and John Carl was just trying to get him to explain what is the legal basis and what is the rationale for a 50% tariff on Brazil, a country that we have a trade surplus with and no national security concerns related to.

And I'd like to play for you the exchange.

On what authority does the president have

to impose tariffs on a country because he doesn't like what that country's judicial system is handling a specific case?

Well, I mean, how is that?

I think it's a national defense emergency, or if he thinks it's a national security threat, that he has the authority under AIPA.

So, so how is it a national security threat that you know, how Brazil is handling a criminal case against this former president?

Well, that's not the only thing.

That's not the only thing.

So, what is it?

I mean, I've asked what it is.

I mean, it seems that that's what President Trump's talking about.

He's talking about his anger and his frustration.

He's been quite candid about it with the Bolsonaro case.

Right.

Well, the bottom line is that what we're doing absolutely collectively across every country is we're onshoring production in the U.S.

to reduce the national emergency that is that we have a massive trade deficit that's putting it at risk should we need production in the U.S.

because of a national security crisis.

And this is part of an overall strategy to do that.

But again, as we've just established, we have a trade surplus with Brazil, not a deficit.

And we've had a surplus with Brazil for 18 years.

How do you live with yourself?

I mean, that is humiliating.

Yeah, no, it is.

Well, he's a hack, and I guess, you know, it's nice to see the hacks have to be even more self-evidently heckish than sometimes in

defending these things.

But it is

and how Congress, I mean, not to get back to one of our favorite themes, but I'll just say for 30 seconds, that Congress has authority over tariffs and trade.

Congress could stop this tomorrow.

They could stop the Brazil tariff.

They could actually pass a law saying you can't use IEPA, which is misusing anyway, if we have an actual surplus with a country that you're using it to justify, you know, using a trade deficit to justify these extraordinary measures.

But, of course, it all should be illegal.

Maybe we'll see if a court does.

One court did find some of it illegal, but Congress is the one who could snatch back authority.

I mean, do the Republicans on the Hill, the combination of these things, does it ever, ever, ever lead them to break a little bit?

I mean, with Hat with Myers, which I was slightly involved in, to get back to you, I hadn't really thought of that analogy.

It was the Republicans.

It wasn't me and David Frum or...

Laura Ingram.

It was the Republican senators, finally.

I think Cornyn, maybe and others like that, who had some stature on judicial matters saying, saying, ugh, no, we can't do this.

We shouldn't do this.

I don't know.

Does anyone ever do that in the era of Trump?

I don't know.

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Maybe only on this final issue, Ukraine.

I mean, a lot of damage, a lot of death, a lot of unnecessary death in Kiev and other places throughout the country because

Russia has continued to bombard them while they pretend to do peace deals while we don't provide them even defensive weapons.

But there's credible seeming reporting today that there might be an announcement that the U.S.

is going to be providing new weapons either to Ukraine or selling them to Europe and having them give them to Ukraine.

We'll see exactly how that works out.

What do you make of that?

And I've got some thoughts, but what do you think?

I mean, it's good.

It's too little, too late.

And so I hope it's not too little, but it's too late and it's better than nothing.

And yeah, as you say, Ukraine is the one issue with the Republicans, even last year, were willing to thwart, go against Trump.

And I think there's some genuine belief there, really.

They care and they think it's a disaster not to help Ukraine.

So I hope they go ahead with it and maybe this reversal of Trump, I don't know politically, if it helps Trump or hurts Trump or people don't really care.

I think it's interesting because,

look, we've got,

I don't know how many a thousand days left with this guy, at least.

Three and a half years.

Whatever that makes up.

It's 11, you know, 1,200 days, something.

It is important to just be like real and like clear-eyed about like what we're dealing with.

And I think that sometimes in the the anti-Trump world, like people dip a little bit into kind of fantastical thinking about it.

And like, this isn't like the Russia thing is a prime example, right?

Because there have been two theories of the case always.

Like, one is like what I will call the Krasnov theory that Trump is a Russian stooge and that Trump is doing whatever Russia wants, and that we are going to slowly reorient ourselves to be an alliance with Russia.

And, you know, who the hell knows what else, what other implications come with that.

And the other that I've always preferred frame is that Trump like

is

a man child that like think that like wants, you know, that's dad didn't hug him enough and that he wants to be respected and he thinks that Putin is his friend and he thinks that the other people were mean to him over Putin and that Putin was really nice to him and that finally

far, far, far too late, he's starting to be like, wait a minute, maybe Putin's not nice to me, actually.

And like, maybe this is wrong, you know, and Zelensky comes to meet him two weeks ago, puts on a suit.

And God love Zelensky for doing this sort of shit.

Having to suck up to Trump, I couldn't fucking do it.

So puts on a suit, you know, butters him up.

And

we'll see.

Maybe that works.

You play it out.

But like, I combine that with, like, I was watching his interview with Lara Trump on Fox.

She's real North Korea type shit over there.

They have a future Senate candidate, maybe, daughter-in-law, interviewing her father-in-law about how great he is.

And she was asking him about his legacy.

Interesting question to ask with three and a half years left in the term.

The first thing he says is, like, I want people to think I'm a good person.

You don't want to overread any random sentence that comes out of Trump's mouth.

But

for me, it was just one more data point towards like, I don't know, man.

He just might be like a sad, pathetic person that like wants to be respected and liked and wants to be on Mount Rushmore and wants people to butter him up and treat him seriously.

And in that like view, it is rational to do that,

to do all the stupid shit that I refuse to do, but that these other guys have to do in order to kind of get him to come around and like say, okay, fine, we can give some patriots to Ukraine.

And if that happens, I just think that will be an important data point to

assess and to like think about how to, you know, kind of process and deal with this fucking lunatic for the remaining time we have i mean i think the foreign leaders have really learned this and have internalized it and i sort of like you i don't blame them especially not someone like zielensky whose

nation is is on the brink but you're the head of nato did that ridiculous suck-up text that trump made pop uh they're defending real and they have real reasons you know, their responsibilities to their citizens to do this.

I don't begrudge them this.

That's very different from people at home strengthening him for the next three and a half years, which is sort of the Republican Congress thing.

But yeah, no, no, it's interesting that you're right.

He's less, maybe a little less ideologically committed to destroying everything good in the world.

He's still like ridiculous.

You know, the weakness is itself a huge problem, obviously.

It's not like Putin couldn't suck up to him for a week or something like that.

And

he does prefer dictators.

That's the final point I'd make.

I mean, the Bolsonaro Putin stuff, he just, that's where his, that's what he admires, you know?

So it's not, it's not good, but it may not be quite as good.

No, it is not good.

I don't want to say that.

No, I know, I think, but it's not quite as bad as some of our friends may sometimes have thought.

Yeah, I just, you know, I keep assessing, you know, I'm always like, I go back to that conversation I had with Chris Hayes on election night where he was like, where we were like, he's like, the, the band of outcomes is the widest possible.

Like, it was literally like Trump could just golf and do nothing for four years and let the status quo go on and be happy he's not in jail, or we could have nuclear winter, right?

Like the band of outcomes was so wide.

And I just, if the Ukraine weapons thing does go through,

you know, it'll just adjust me back one tick towards away from the, away from the worst possible outcome.

That's all.

Right.

And my little modification might be, I think the band of outcomes could be a little better than one might have feared in foreign policy for certain reasons that are unique to foreign policy.

If you want to be a success, you do have these other nations.

I do think at home, on the other hand, don't you think in the first six months, we've been pretty close to the red zone in the band of outcomes.

I mean, deportations and politicization of justice and the whole just destruction of our scientific research.

I mean, it's that stuff has been really well

bad.

Yeah, not great.

Uh, close to the red zone,

but uh, I don't know.

Okay, well, uh, we need a meter.

I need to like create a meter, you know.

Yeah, I was thinking, I said the red zone thing.

I was thinking of like one of those, you know,

I don't know what I was thinking of exactly.

They're those meters, right?

Yeah, what do we do during the DHS?

Now, I know you want to get rid of DHS now, but in the original days of Tom Ridge, we had the threat assessment, you know, the orange and the yellow.

And we can, uh, we'll have to go back to look at at that all right thanks to bill crystal he'll be back next monday uh you and me well we need each other so we're gonna be back here tomorrow with another edition of the bulwark podcast i'll see y'all then and every single day this week don't worry about it no holidays no vacations

bye peace

I only wanna see the light that shines behind your eyes.

I hope that I can say the things I wish I said.

So sing myself to sleep and take me back to bed.

You want to be alone and we can be alive instead.

You and

We need

each other.

We believe

we won another.

And I know we are gonna walk over.

We're sleeping in our soul

because we need

each other.

We believe

we wanna.

I know we

don't wanna cover.

We're sleeping in our soul.

We're sleeping in our soul.

There are many things that I would like to know.

And there are many places that I wish to go.

But everything's dependent on the way the wind may blow.

I don't know what it is that makes me feel alive.

I don't know how to wake up sleep inside.

I only wanna see the light that shines behind your eyes.

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

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