Bill Kristol: Trump Is Not the Right Man for a Crisis

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Speaker 3 Hello, and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Much to discuss today.

Speaker 3 Since we got together with Mark Cuban last week, you know, we've bombed Iran. A lot is happening on the weekends these days.

Speaker 3 So if you are, you know, need your fix and you're in the need for Bulwark Takes, reminder that we do have a Bulwark Takes podcast feed that you can log on for where we put in breaking news and other kind of random ephemera.

Speaker 3 And on YouTube and Substack, we go live from time to time. We did so.
Sarah JVL and I did so after Trump's comments on Saturday about the bombing. So FYI on that, but it's Monday.

Speaker 3 So we are here today with editor-at-large Bill Crystal. How are you doing, Bill?

Speaker 1 Fine.

Speaker 1 And while we're promoting bulwark content, over the weekend, Sam Stein had an excellent interview with Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on House Intelligence, who's upset about the lack of congressional notice or authorization.

Speaker 1 And then I had a conversation with Eric Edelman yesterday on the foreign policy side of this. So, yeah, there's a lot of content on the bulwark.
I have trouble keeping up with it.

Speaker 1 I keep up with all your stuff, Jim. You know, you got to go to this.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Bill.

Speaker 1 This is the best stuff first, you know.

Speaker 3 And that's fine. People don't have to watch every single thing.
You know, it's a do what, do what serves you. That's the purpose of this effort.

Speaker 3 I watched your Eric Edelban conversation, and I'm delighted to announce that we might have a little bit of a disagreement on this podcast. And I was thinking back, we've been doing this every Monday.

Speaker 3 We've been agreeing a little too much. It's concerning.
And I was thinking about the last major disagreement I remembered. And it turned out you were right on that one.

Speaker 3 So maybe we'll even steven it, or maybe we'll be 2-0 for you. We'll see how things shake out.

Speaker 3 But that was with regards to Joe Biden, where we were totally aligned on Joe Biden not running, being opposed to him running in 2022 and early 2023.

Speaker 3 But eventually I came around to the idea that, okay, maybe we should just circle the wagons around the old man, like it's too late to do anything about it. And you were resilient in arguing.

Speaker 3 It was not too late. We should not circle the wagons.
And then I came back around to your position after the debate.

Speaker 3 So anyway, anyway, one point for you on that one and we'll see how today's disagreement shakes out.

Speaker 1 Maybe only a half point since after all that, Biden got out and who's the president of the United States now.

Speaker 1 Fair enough.

Speaker 1 I don't want to take too much credit for that.

Speaker 3 Fair enough. So before we get into the merits of our disagreement, one delicious item I think of Shad and Freuda together is just we look at the Iran situation.

Speaker 3 And that is that the vice president of the United States is really squirming. There is nobody in a tougher political position right now than J.D.
Vance.

Speaker 3 You wrote about this morning for the newsletter how Trump just dunked on him and emasculated him, essentially, with one bleat where he talked about, where he countered JD's comment on the morning shows, where J.D.

Speaker 3 had said that, of course, we're not for regime change and we're not dumb like all the other presidents and journalists.

Speaker 3 I'm, you know, his sort of haughty, condescending rebuttal to the questioner who's asking about regime change.

Speaker 3 And Trump, a couple hours later, bleats out, well, you know, regime change might be all right, actually. We'll see how it goes.
And JD just,

Speaker 3 you know, I think he's struggling to find where, you know, where the water table line is for him on this.

Speaker 1 I mean, I sort of made up in morning shots what I thought Trump's mental process might have been, watching JD say, we don't want the regime change.

Speaker 1 Hexeth and Rubio had previously said, perfectly reasonably inconsistent with the actual intention of the operation, the point of it isn't regime change. And that's not why we're doing this.

Speaker 1 And I think that's actually true.

Speaker 1 But it was very revealing, I thought, about JD's worldview, that he didn't say, you know, the point of this isn't regime change.

Speaker 1 We're not intervening for the sake of regime change, but we don't want a regime change.

Speaker 1 And I do, I'm giving Trump maybe a little more credit than I should here, but I think he had kind of a normal reaction to that American reaction, which is, really?

Speaker 1 I mean, they'd be better off if the ITO has left. We're not going to put boots on the ground.
We're not going to do AB or C.

Speaker 1 You know, we're not going to maybe even do other things that we could do diplomatically and that a more internationalist-minded administration might do.

Speaker 1 But saying we don't want it, that's a little weird. Maybe Trump didn't have any of that mind, any of that mental process.
Maybe that's just me thinking that.

Speaker 1 And maybe Trump just finds JD annoying, which is quite possible.

Speaker 1 But he certainly went out of it, I agree, he went out of his way with that late afternoon tweet or truth social or whatever those things are to let it look like he was slapping him down.

Speaker 1 And certainly no one from the White House, to my knowledge, came out in the next. you know, four or five hours and said, oh, you guys are all misinterpreting that tweet.

Speaker 1 It had nothing to do with what J.D., right? Don't you think it was kind of, you've been in these spokesman positions, to say the the least.

Speaker 1 Don't you think it was kind of noticeable that no one from the White House was like saying, oh, no, Trump and JD, they're totally on the same page, you know.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, because they're all lapdogs for Trump and they can't, right? Like they can't, to do that would be to undermine Trump, right? Which nobody can do.

Speaker 3 And just to put a finer point on the political pickle the JD is in, right? There's this conversation that's going around about, oh, will MAGA split over this?

Speaker 3 And I don't know where you are on that, but I discussed that with Sarah and J.V. Overleekin.
And I'm just, we're all pretty bearish on the notion that that MAGA will split.

Speaker 3 The biggest percentage of MAGA are people that are essentially in a cult and just are going to go along with whatever Trump wants, and they don't want anybody to undermine Mr. Trump.

Speaker 3 And they want the left to feel like they're losing and Trump to feel like they're winning. Like, that's the median Trump voter.

Speaker 3 Are there some people underneath that who have strongly held views about foreign policy? Yeah. On both sides of Trump, certainly.

Speaker 3 You saw the Nikki Haley vote was what, 15% of the primary. I'm sure a Tucker vote would get about 15%, but that still leaves 70% that are just going to go along with Trump.

Speaker 3 The split becomes very real, though, for JD.

Speaker 3 Because if we do get to a point where there's an open primary and Trump's out of the picture,

Speaker 3 then

Speaker 3 things get scrambled. And JD knows that to become the heir, his top priority is to make sure Mr.
Trump is happy, right? Because he needs that 70% to see him as the heir.

Speaker 3 But then the next obligation is to kind of align himself more with what he sees as the whatever, Tucker Bannon-ish

Speaker 3 isolationist wing. And those two things are in tension right now.
And he is like really in a bind.

Speaker 3 And you can just see it in every comment that he makes that he's really straining to try to navigate it.

Speaker 1 I think he thinks he's in a bind for exactly the reason you said. I actually don't think it's that much of a bind.
Like, I don't think it's a close call.

Speaker 1 What he needs in 2028 is Donald Trump to support him. Period.
That means he should be slavishly loyal to Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 And people like us should make fun of him for three years, as they made fun of Bush in 85, 86, 87, the original Bush, to H.W. Bush, for being slavishly supportive of Reagan.

Speaker 1 And he was a lapdog, I think George Will called him on some famous pieces.

Speaker 3 Not exactly the same thing. And Reagan wasn't going out of his way to just

Speaker 3 send flares to humiliate H.W.

Speaker 1 No, fair enough. Well, fair enough.
So there was a little bit of tiny bit of that. Anyway, I don't, it's not a good comparison.
In some ways, I agree. But anyway, I think Vance's call politically,

Speaker 1 not that I'm advising him on this, I don't want to, but would be to just be for Trump, just define the mission as not a regime change mission, fine, just as Rubio and Hexet did, and then emphasize that, look, he, Vance did this a little, actually.

Speaker 1 So, you know, this is getting rid of a very dangerous nuclear situation. It's a one-all, you know, it's a one.
There aren't many regimes. It's not like we're intervening anywhere else.

Speaker 1 There aren't many regimes. There are no other regimes in the world, literally, that have this kind of nuclear program and these kinds of missiles that aren't already nuclear powers.

Speaker 1 Vance is probably overthinking. A, he may believe, he really believes in the Tucker, you know, isolationist banned worldview, no question about that.

Speaker 1 He's probably closer to them personally and moved by them. And he's probably overestimates, I think, their power.
A lot of the Trump support, I guess, I would just slightly modify what you said.

Speaker 1 Maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 1 It's just they like America bombing countries that are far away, that are unplugged, that they don't like anyway, and that has killed American troops and have and held Americans hostages.

Speaker 1 I don't think there's a heck of a lot of...

Speaker 1 I'm very curious to see what the polls show this week. I think there was some polling last week that showed, oh, people are very resistant to this.
Maybe I'm underestimating the Iraq effect.

Speaker 1 Maybe I'm overestimating a kind of just American belligerence. But I think Trump taps into that, actually.

Speaker 1 And we could all say Trump was more isolationist, more restraint type, which he was, than Hillary or than Biden.

Speaker 1 But he also does tap into a certain kind of just, you know, well, when we act, we're just going to kick the shit out of them. And I think JD cannot walk away from that side of Trumpism.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't know. I think that if Trump decided to bomb Iran, that 70% of the MAGA base would be with him.
And if he decided to bomb Israel, 70% of the time.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, no, that's true.

Speaker 3 And if he decided to do nothing, 70% would be with him.

Speaker 1 And if it's a success. Yeah.
No, I don't disrespect. I don't fight Greg Israel, but I totally agree.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm exaggerating. I agree with your point.

Speaker 1 No, I wasn't trying to make it a Ran-specific point, though. I think Iran has a slightly special place in the hearts or the opposite of hearts, whatever that is, of Americans.

Speaker 1 But anyway, I don't disagree. But anyway, I think you're making my point in a way, right? That doesn't he just want to be with Trump, J.D.?

Speaker 3 Yeah, right. For sure.
He should feel that way. But he,

Speaker 3 I don't know. He's wrapped around the axle, I guess.
Yeah. And that's enjoyable to watch.

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Speaker 3 So let's just get to the merits. I guess the bombing actually happened after we taped on Friday.
So we've covered zero of it on this podcast.

Speaker 3 Your conversation with Edelman, for folks that want a deep dive, a deep wonky dive on the arguments for the bombings of the nuclear sites, they should go check that out.

Speaker 3 Could you give folks maybe just a reader's digest version of what the bold case would be for this action?

Speaker 1 I think Eric tried to lay out, I tried to kind of the

Speaker 1 moderate bold case, which is whatever one might have thought in the past about diplomacy, about bombing, about other moments when we could have acted more aggressively, this is a very unusual moment.

Speaker 1 I mean, we have had Israel destroyed Hezbollah, the Syrian regime fell, so Israel was able to do a week of bombing that no one would have anticipated and seems to have done it pretty effectively.

Speaker 1 And then leaving us in the position of finishing the job is too strong, but going some steps towards coming closer to finishing the job, however you want to put it.

Speaker 1 You know, we don't know that yet, obviously, with Fordeau and stuff, but doing a lot more damage.

Speaker 1 And the cost of doing it, the risk of doing it at this moment, I think, much, much less than it would have been three or four years ago.

Speaker 1 I think a lot of the analysis is mired in a world where Hezbollah was really strong and Iran was really able to control them and the threat of attacks on U.S. troops was very real and stuff.

Speaker 1 I think that's just so much, I hope at least, that that's so much reduced now. And that we we retain huge deterrent effect.
I mean, it's not as if it's their turn or we just have to sit back.

Speaker 1 And I think Trump actually was quite good in that way, warning them that, hey, incidentally, if you think of

Speaker 1 doing anything more, you're going to get it again. So I feel like the risks are manageable.

Speaker 3 The upside is real.

Speaker 1 Leaving it undone and not helping Israel at this point, it's not like we get any credit from anti-Israel regimes around the world.

Speaker 1 The final point Eric makes, which I hadn't really thought of, and it's not a bad message to send other dictators that at some point, you know, the use of force remains in our toolkit, so to speak.

Speaker 1 We've been so reluctant with Obama and then Trump, even Biden, he helped Ukraine, but no for no offensive weapons, you know, so reluctant to cross that line.

Speaker 1 And again, we're not talking about boots on the ground. Not a bad message to send that, you know, we do remain a superpower willing to use force if necessary, but in a very precise and targeted way.

Speaker 1 So I think that's the basic case for it.

Speaker 3 I'll just add on to that, because as I've said all last week, I've been kind of really mixed and torn on it. I think I kind of end up falling on the other side, which we'll get to in a second.

Speaker 3 But on the case for it was, and A, the Soleimani experience is just worth mentioning, right? Like, if this does end up such as that, like, that was a net positive.

Speaker 3 And there were a lot of folks that were hair on fire after Soleimani was killed, you know, saying this is going to lead to a wider regional war, and it didn't.

Speaker 3 And so that is just like an important data point to not brush over when

Speaker 3 looking at this. And just

Speaker 3 to kind of expand on what you said about how weakened the Iranian regime is, I mean, like they're just getting dunked on by Mossad, like left and right. And it's kind of crazy just how

Speaker 3 effective Israel has been in taking out their leaders. And I saw some Mossad social media posts where it was like, there was a leader of a garrison.
He got shot.

Speaker 3 like by somebody with inside Iran and then survived. Then an ambulance went to pick him up and then a drone hit the ambulance.

Speaker 3 And it's like they've just been like all up in the kitchen here to the point that it's like,

Speaker 3 how much of the IRGC

Speaker 3 are Israeli operatives at this point? They are not only weakened, but I think internally they're in a very tough position as far as responding from the regime.

Speaker 3 And it is a regime that the last thing that I'll say that has over the past two decades caused a lot of death and destruction via proxies, you direct to act via cyber, et cetera.

Speaker 3 So, anything else on the bull case before I offer the other side of the argument?

Speaker 1 Just one footnote to what you're saying, Chris. I mean,

Speaker 1 often we don't act in certain situations because we want to be able to be a broker or we want to stay out. We don't want to be the object of hatred or resentment.

Speaker 1 I don't think much of that holds in this case either.

Speaker 1 It's not like the Iranian regime, if wounded, but if it's wounded as it is and stays in place, which it may, isn't going to hate us as much as it hates Israel. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 It's like the neighbors aren't going to blow up. I was there in the first Bush White House 30 years ago.

Speaker 1 And there were real concerns that first Gulf War about what would happen with all the other Arab nations and stuff.

Speaker 1 I mean, the Arab nations, whatever they're saying publicly, clearly had no big problem with this. They don't see a heck of a lot of rallying to Iran.

Speaker 1 Incidentally, Putin and NG have been awfully restrained. So I just feel that the

Speaker 1 cards kind of line. You hate to say this because God knows things could go wrong.
And I stipulate that right now. But the cards seem to have been lined up in a pretty opportune way for this action.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 3 So now here's where we talked about, let's go to the possibility of things going wrong. Because I was reading a lot about it.

Speaker 3 And as I said, like a lot of what I've read affirmed what Eric was talking about, just about the weakness of the Iranian regime and the opportunity that was presented.

Speaker 3 That said, it's kind of a touchy subject to frame it this way. So I just, I want to be clear about my words because I'm all for supporting.
Israel is an important ally to us in the region.

Speaker 3 I'm all for supporting them in ways that make sense strategically. I just look at this action of us actually doing the bombing, like the U.S.

Speaker 3 taking the lead and doing the bombing of Ford and other sites. And I come to the conclusion that I think that this action, just looking at the short term, made Israel safer.

Speaker 3 Not totally safe. Obviously, Israel has a ton of risks.

Speaker 3 But what they've done with Iran and Hezbollah, obviously Israel is safer now than they were six months ago. And it's made us like marginally less safe because the bases, the U.S.

Speaker 3 bases are more at risk now of what, an Iraqi proxy, et cetera. Terror threat, I think, is higher both from proxies and lone wolves.
Possibly a state violence against us.

Speaker 3 We don't know, but we will see. Now Trump's ego is kind of in play as far as potential escalation, like something happens and we end up getting down an escalatory pipeline.
We didn't have to.

Speaker 3 And all of it for a threat that was like not really acute to us. We don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but

Speaker 3 they were getting closer, but they weren't particularly close. It wasn't imminent.
And it's not like if they got one, you know, Miami is at risk of being nuked by Tehran anytime soon.

Speaker 3 I'm not a foreign policy expert.

Speaker 3 So I grant that this is kind of like a basic way to look at it. But sometimes there's some value in just kind of looking at it from a more simplistic standpoint.

Speaker 3 And I think that you can get kind of wrapped up into the geopolitics of it.

Speaker 3 I just look at it and think, with Trump as president and like the way that the status quo was with Iran felt like a more stable status quo for us, America, than it is today.

Speaker 3 What would you say to that?

Speaker 1 No, I think that's well said. And I don't, I mean, it's the right, those are the right qualifications or reservations to raise.

Speaker 1 And sadly, if we could have, and I don't know if we could have, given Israel the B-2s and to drop the big bombs on Ford 0, that would have been preferable.

Speaker 1 So I agree with your sense that if we didn't have to get involved, we shouldn't have.

Speaker 1 Now, the way I guess I don't think our Air Force is sort of willing to train Israeli pilots for two weeks, give them the keys and

Speaker 3 a B2 Uber situation?

Speaker 1 Look, we've sold them and to some degree given them a lot of the other material they're using.

Speaker 1 It wouldn't be totally crazy to have said quietly two weeks ago, why don't we just give Israel 12 bombs that they can use? I mean,

Speaker 1 we've done that in other wars, right? We've given Israel material. We've given other Allies material.
We've given the Ukrainians material.

Speaker 1 Sometimes we were a little nervous about how they would use it. We still gave them material.
So

Speaker 1 I don't disagree with that. For whatever reason, we weren't going to do that.
And maybe we were right not to. And so that, I think, met was a little more of a stark choice.

Speaker 1 I don't disagree with your worries. I think the biggest one, you slightly maybe buried the lead, maybe you intended to.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think Trump being president and Trump's team being in charge is a legitimate concern. That is, I hesitated a fair amount

Speaker 1 as this strike became pretty likely, and I thought it was by the middle of last week, about, you know, and it's not, it wasn't like I was going to to quote endorse it or not endorse it I was just going to say what I thought as it happened but and try to be sober about it but you know I do not trust Trump to be a good wartime president even if it's not really a war but a good even military operation president I don't trust exf I don't trust a lot of the others the ego gets involved as you say the the the grandiosity so that was the single thing that my friend Bob Kagan wrote a piece Saturday yeah let's just talk about that because I was I had three other little sub-bullets that are less my core arguments

Speaker 3 But yeah, so there are three other arguments against that are kind of out there. Kagan's, I think, in The Atlantic, and we can put that in the show notes.
Folks can go read it.

Speaker 3 His was really more focused on domestic concerns, that like essentially that Trump becoming a wartime president would empower him potentially, would, you know, if there is a response, would allow him to take more wartime powers, emergency powers, stuff he already wants to do, and that he was against it for that reason.

Speaker 3 What did you make of Kagan's argument?

Speaker 1 So, So, yeah, I think you put that well. So, Trump, maybe there's a 1A and a 1B on the Trump question.

Speaker 1 The 1A is wars make countries more authoritarian to the degree that we are now at a war or possible or

Speaker 1 occasion that might lead to a war or lead to renewed military activities.

Speaker 1 Trump might use that as an excuse, or in any case, just the momentum of it might make it easier for him to do all kinds of authoritarian things, including politicizing the military and all that.

Speaker 1 So, that's the, let's say, the domestic consequences of this in terms of Trump's authoritarianism. authoritarianism.
Bob was very focused on that. And I think it's a fair thing to worry about.

Speaker 1 I'm not, I don't think it's that big.

Speaker 1 You know, again, if it is a couple, even if it's one or even if it's three or four military strikes against Iran, I don't really think it changes the dynamics much here at home.

Speaker 1 So I'm less worried about that, but it's a fair point. The other is a point that Bob also mentions, but was the one I was mentioning more this time, which is, well, will he, in fact, be a good war?

Speaker 1 president, or let's just say a good crisis president. And it's not crazy to take the position.

Speaker 1 You know what would be good, given that Donald Trump is president, Pete XS there, all these characters, Tulsi Gabbard, the best thing we can hope for in the next four years is no crises.

Speaker 1 And to the degree that we have some optionality, some choice in whether a crisis becomes a real crisis or it's just a slightly far away crisis between two other countries, we should err on the side of not making it our crisis.

Speaker 1 And I take that point.

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Speaker 3 We kind of glossed over the regime change side of this, the mega. Bill seems mega curious, which we'll just let that

Speaker 3 leave that for a second.

Speaker 3 The other thing, I think the other concern that people have that kind of relates to what I was talking about earlier about Israel is that obviously it's in Israel's security interests for there to be regime change, or they at least perceive it to be.

Speaker 3 I mean, they assume that a regime that would replace the Ayatollah would be less hostile. It's hard to be more hostile than one that has a clock counting down towards your elimination, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we have the Israeli Defense Minister this morning, Katz, says the IDF is currently striking regime targets and symbols of government oppression in Tehran,

Speaker 3 including a prison for political prisoners,

Speaker 3 their internal security HQ, et cetera. Trump might be in the position of, oh, wouldn't regime change be great, but we're not trying to effectuate it.

Speaker 3 And it seems like our partners in Israel might be in a position of trying to effectuate it. And we get kind of

Speaker 3 tied into that. What do you make of that concern?

Speaker 1 I think that's a fair point. And maybe you shouldn't have tweeted it at all, you know, but given that he did, I thought, you know, it's sort of worth interpreting it.

Speaker 1 And as I say, it's both to his, maybe prudence would have said to keep quiet, but since he wasn't going to keep quiet either way, nice that he vaguely expresses the old-fashioned principle that we are kind of on the side of liberty for people around the world if it's possible.

Speaker 1 I mean, Israel, I think, is inclined to hope more for regimes.

Speaker 3 Well, not in North Korea or Russia, by the way.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the thing. That's not so terrible.
Well, but I think from the, okay, that's terrible.

Speaker 1 And we should make that point, though, it feels to me like that's a bit of a vulnerability now for Trump to say, well, hey, what about other dictators? It's not going to affect him, obviously.

Speaker 1 Could it affect a little bit some other of his supporters, some Republicans in Congress? I don't know. Maybe not.
But maybe they just treat Israel and Iran as a special case.

Speaker 1 I'm against treating Israel as a special case in this respect, that I mean, I'm for helping Ukraine, I'm helping Israel.

Speaker 1 I think it's a mistake. It does probably hurt Israel ultimately to treat it entirely as its own unique, distinctive, the only country we're supposed to roll out to help or to like around the world.

Speaker 1 So so many more things one could say about all this, but a lot of it is obviously, we don't know. I mean, these things will always have some anticipated consequences.

Speaker 1 I think, you know, moving the needle a little bit to make it easier for the Iranian people to effectuate regime change is a little different from invading a country and bringing about regime change.

Speaker 1 I mean, Iraq is way over on one side of the spectrum. Israel seems to be moving from, you know, here to here, you know, I mean, but within a sort of pretty limited boundary.

Speaker 1 And I don't object to that particularly. But I agree we get a little bit implicated.
We are now implicated. We used force on behalf of Israel.
We're a little more implicated than we were.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't we have been pretty implicated anyway, though?

Speaker 3 All right. I had one more thing on this, like kind of a news item is out this morning that's worth monitoring related to the situation.

Speaker 3 There was a lot of chest thumping yesterday from the administration, you know, total elimination of the

Speaker 3 nuclear ambitions of Iran. Looking a little murkier this morning, right? Like whether Ford was actually eliminated.
It seems like maybe partially.

Speaker 3 Obviously, this is not to say that there was not great damage done, but maybe partially, not completely eliminated.

Speaker 3 But more strikingly, the question of where is the Iranian uranium is now floating out there. The New York Times is a report.

Speaker 3 It says that the actual state of the nuclear program seems far more murky, with senior officials conceding they did not know the fate of Iran's stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium.

Speaker 3 There was evidence, according to two Israeli officials with knowledge of the intelligence, that Iran had moved equipment and uranium from the site in recent days, maybe due in part to Trump's crazy bleats, which circles us back to whether we want Trump in charge during a crisis.

Speaker 3 So, I don't know. And you're talking to

Speaker 3 more folks than I am, kind of in the national security space. Like, what's the feeling of

Speaker 3 the effectiveness at this point?

Speaker 1 We don't know.

Speaker 1 Pretty effective, but whether very effective or they move some stuff. Now, you can move the stuff, but if you don't have the ability to do much with it,

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 effect. You know, just one final point on the whole thing.

Speaker 1 I guess one question, and this is, I think, a tough thing to answer is the more we do the job now, the less likely it's likely to pop up as something that seems to require further action six months or 18 months from now, right?

Speaker 1 And I think that's important.

Speaker 1 If you think it's an unstable area, if you don't really trust that as an Yahoo government, if you don't trust the Trump administration, I mean, the happy story here in a funny way would be this is kind of one and done.

Speaker 1 They're set back pretty far. It's going to take them quite a while, even if the regime doesn't fall and be replaced by something better, which would be nice.

Speaker 1 they're going to be set back they're not going to be able to do much take them a heck of a long time to reconstitute things we've bought time not just bought time in the nuclear program bought time where we're not going to have another crisis in a year because one of the problems with trump doing nothing is the Israeli government sitting there thinking, okay, well, now we've got to have a Fordo plan, which we're going to execute in six months, which is going to be an extremely dramatic, you know, I'm making this up, obviously, but you know, whatever, your paratroopers landing and all this.

Speaker 1 And then you, you know, so I think you could argue that this action makes stability, I even use that word, relative stability, more likely six or 12 or 18 months out.

Speaker 3 But who knows? We'll report back on that in two weeks. I'm going to clip and save that one.
Just, you know, so you have me on the Biden point. I shouldn't have said that.

Speaker 3 If you love you on relative stability, I'll report back on that at Labor Day.

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Speaker 3 There's a video out.

Speaker 3 It's a really horrifying video out out of Southern California, one of these immigration cases. There's so many of these.

Speaker 3 It's sort of when you use this one as an example to kind of talk about the state of affairs. Narquiso Barranco is the man.
He is, I guess, doing landscaping outside an IHOP.

Speaker 3 He's a worker doing landscaping in Southern California. He's from Santa Ana.
He's got three sons. They're all Marines.
At least one of them had served in Afghanistan. And

Speaker 3 he, I presume, is undocumented. I haven't seen that confirmed by the news.
An unmarked SUV drives up to the IHOP.

Speaker 3 and another unmarked car, and six guys in masks and like glasses, you you can't even see their faces with no identification, jump out.

Speaker 3 And according to his son, Varanka starts running, which seems a kind of reasonable thing to do.

Speaker 3 If six dudes in masks jump out of an unmarked SUV and start chasing at you, then he ends up getting thrown to the ground. After he's clearly subdued, he's getting maced.

Speaker 3 They're hitting him in his head. Another, an onlooker, is posting this on social media.
He's thrown into the car. And this is just a crazy way to treat people.

Speaker 3 It's completely authoritarian and fascistic. It feels like everybody's moved on from this fact.
Important fact, we've still militarized the National Guard.

Speaker 3 We still have military in the streets of LA for no apparent reason right now. Thoughts on kind of those two data points together?

Speaker 1 Well, on that latter point, we've increased the number of

Speaker 1 National Guard, doubled it, right, in the streets of LA, even as the protests have died down and there's been almost no violence, I gather, for the last several days.

Speaker 1 And ICE is doing its thing, as you just mentioned, in LA and other places, and doing doing it in a very bad way, in my opinion. But

Speaker 1 that gets me very worried. I mean, there, I'm sort of, I'm not too alarmed about what Trump's done.
In fact, I was somewhat supportive of it in Iran.

Speaker 1 I am very alarmed about the fact that we've now normalized the use of the Guard and the Marines in L.A. And if L.A.
had some disturbances, why won't it be somewhere else two weeks from now?

Speaker 1 And he's clear, the principle of it for him, and the courts haven't struck this down, is he can use them wherever the state and local authorities are in his judgment, in his judgment, not doing enough.

Speaker 3 Yeah, can I just chime in on this point really quick? Because it's just important to think about this. Like, he's still doing this over the objection of the state's governor.

Speaker 3 So, like, it's totally unprecedented. Something that hasn't happened since the civil rights era, right?

Speaker 3 That the president of the United States has nationalized the California Guard over the objection of the governor.

Speaker 3 And so, you would, I think that that would only, you know, be acceptable in the most extreme circumstances, right?

Speaker 3 And so, even in the most generous interpretation for the administration, the idea that this was necessary during that first weekend when the Waymos were on fire or whatever, and they were like, there was a couple of blocks where there was some rioting and you needed military to come in and help tamp that down.

Speaker 3 Even in that generous interpretation, which obviously I was opposed to and found absurd at the time,

Speaker 3 there is no rationale for it now. There's nothing.
It's crazy. Like these are the National Guard troops are people with lives.
Like they also, they all have other jobs.

Speaker 3 They're being taken away from their families.

Speaker 3 The people on the streets of LA are like living in a militarized zone where there has to be fear. A friend of mine lives in L.A.
said

Speaker 3 a 60-year-old that he works with didn't have her birthday party because she's friends and family that have mixed status and she was afraid that it was going to get raided.

Speaker 3 And this is a preposterous, authoritarian, offensive way for people to live. And there's no

Speaker 3 stated rationale for it. Like, what is the rationale?

Speaker 1 Well, the real rationale, of course, is the unstated one. And I do do think this is true.
And one sounds like one of these alarmist authoritarianisms around the corner. But it is.

Speaker 1 I mean, this, the rationale is he wants the ability to use the military domestically.

Speaker 1 And he wants it to be done at his whim and on his say-so, and over the objections of state and local authorities, because he sees disturbances, or maybe they have information and intelligence that would suggest planned disturbances.

Speaker 1 And so I do not think it's at all paranoid to be extremely concerned about this. The courts have sort of intervened, but then there are issues with why the courts didn't fully intervene.

Speaker 1 Congress is being its usual pathetic self. And I would say, honestly, on this one, the popular backlash is less than it should.

Speaker 1 There's so many, I don't blame people, there's so many outrages, so many individual cases of outrage in the detention and mass deportation world that,

Speaker 1 but just the general fact of these troops being on the streets, it really is cause for alarm. And then on the particular case you cited, it's really horrifying.
And again, what are we doing?

Speaker 1 The guy showed up for work as a gardener, I think, in a landscaper. They know his name.

Speaker 1 They probably know where he lives. They probably can find him if he runs away.
Leave aside, why are they deporting this guy? I mean, he's, as far as we know, was showing up for a peaceful job.

Speaker 1 Now it turns out.

Speaker 3 This is America First. There's people clamoring for the jobs, mowing the lawn outside IHOP.

Speaker 1 Even

Speaker 3 like the America First Nationalist rubric, this is crazy.

Speaker 1 I mean, I understand they're not going to do computer searches and discover his three sons or Marines, though I guess they're doing computer searches on everything else, why can't they do this?

Speaker 1 Actually, it'd be better than searching people's, you know, people who are coming in to be researchers at Harvard Medical School, searching their social media accounts, you know.

Speaker 1 But they relish the use of force. Again, I guess they hope it's going to lead to self-deportation for a lot of other people.
So, again, that's a bit of the hidden agenda here.

Speaker 1 It's not just literally that they're going to catch all these people and detain them and deport them. It's also they hope other people will deport themselves.
But for what?

Speaker 1 I mean, for what are we talking about here? Again,

Speaker 1 guys,

Speaker 1 maybe they'll now discover some driving violation eight years ago and you know try to make him into quote a criminal, but there's I don't I haven't followed it as closely as I might have, so I don't I don't think there's anything

Speaker 3 that raised three kids went on to serve the country and is mowing lawns outside IHOP.

Speaker 3 We're going to deport him in the name of what safety, the name of American, the American sovereignty being violated or jobs like the forgotten man in fucking Ohio wants to work mowing lawns at IHOP in Southern California.

Speaker 3 Like, it's the whole thing is just preposterous. And to do it, masked, no identification, guys getting thrown into the back of this SUV.

Speaker 3 I mean, you think about it, and he assumes that this is the real ICE, but you can't be sure. This is happening now where people are imitating ICE in other places.

Speaker 3 He might be getting kidnapped by some dudes.

Speaker 1 Who knows what's happening? No, totally. And a final point just on how grotesque this whole is, and there's not maybe quite as much reactions as there should be.

Speaker 1 One part of this bill, reconciliation bill that's moving through Congress, I guess through the Senate this week, is massive amounts of money for ICE and for the Border Patrol and for detention facilities and for deportation efforts.

Speaker 1 You know, there's so much else in the bill, the taxes, obviously the Medicaid cuts, Medicare cuts and all kinds of other things. But this is bad.

Speaker 1 I mean, so if we don't like what ICE is doing now, what Trump is doing. Very much a key part of the bill.
He and Stephen Miller have emphasized it. There's no talk about taking this out.

Speaker 1 There was a little, like, there was talk for 10 seconds about maybe there's a little more money in there than we need. I think someone like Ron Johnson, you know, like suggested that.

Speaker 1 They immediately slapped him down. So let's have four or five times as much, I mean, literally, of what we're doing now of detention and deportation.

Speaker 1 Our friend Reichland Melenick says, we could have something like 100,000 people detained in the United States two or three years from now at one time by ICE.

Speaker 1 What does that start to look like? So that the combination of that

Speaker 1 kind of militarization or beefing up of that whole side of law enforcement slash militarization combined with the ability to use the troops. Very bad.

Speaker 1 But I wish people would scream and yell a little more about this provision in that reconciliation bill. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 3 So really, that's the future of America. That's what we're going to make America great again.
More private prisons and detention centers. Those are our growth industries.

Speaker 3 I appreciate you mentioning that. We just want to think, because I forget who I was having a disagreement with somebody.

Speaker 3 It was kind of just a real good faith argument where they're talking about how, you know, is this kind of the media overplaying these stories?

Speaker 3 Because like, isn't it true that Biden and Obama also deported a lot of folks? And we didn't see these stories like this.

Speaker 3 And there were certainly cases of inappropriate actions by ICE during the Obama and Biden years.

Speaker 3 I don't want to say that there wasn't, but that those stats that go around about how Biden, Obama was a deporter in chief and Biden was, a lot of that was like we were letting people in at the border and then they're getting, they were being turned around, right?

Speaker 3 And so like when you think about the counting numbers and how stats can deceive, it's like, oh, you don't have it in front of me, but oh, Biden deported a million people.

Speaker 3 Well, a lot of those people are people that like came across the border,

Speaker 3 you know, encountered an agent, got sent back right across the border, right? And so, hey, the amount of time that goes into that is little, the appropriateness of it. So,

Speaker 3 people aren't coming to the border now, which Trump people take as a win. Very, very few.
And so, to get to those same numbers, you're having to do things like these IHOP landscaping rates, right?

Speaker 3 I thought that might just be kind of some useful context for people because there are folks who are confused with that.

Speaker 1 No, it's very useful.

Speaker 1 And it looks some number, in addition to the border people who were being sort of deported just after crossing of the deportations in the pre-2025 cases were people who were undocumented who had committed crimes, had been convicted, had served time, some of them fairly small crimes, some of them very serious crimes.

Speaker 1 And then basically ICE showed up at the prison.

Speaker 1 They got notifications that this guy who was undocumented was about to be released. They released him to ICE.
ICE took him to the airport.

Speaker 1 They flew him to Mexico or to Guatemala or something like that, which no one was raising great objections to. I don't have great objections to it.
And this was being done.

Speaker 1 And that's incidentally why the whole Sanctuary City thing, why did that become important? Think about that.

Speaker 1 The reason was that the cops, were the cops going to cooperate with ICE?

Speaker 1 If they just arrested someone before he'd been charged, were they going to let ICE deport him or were they going to wait till going through the formal proceedings and so forth?

Speaker 1 People can differ on that. But again, at least those people were lawbreakers or plausibly lawbreakers.
We're way beyond that. And that is what's, I think, the key point.

Speaker 1 We are in just a different world. Biden, I mean, this is a great point of bitterness for Stephen Viller and Trump.

Speaker 1 Biden's DHS secretary did not order ICE to go arrest people like the landscaper at IHOP.

Speaker 1 If he was not otherwise committing crimes, basically they let him alone and let him pay taxes if he registered, which meant he did.

Speaker 3 Yeah, this guy was paying taxes, Bronco. One more immigration thing.
Alec Mahmoud Khalil was released. He immediately goes to Colombia to start protesting.

Speaker 3 I saw a lot of chatter about this over weekend from the right about, like, oh, the communist left is cheering this horrible person that got released and upset that we're bombing Iranian nuclear strikes.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they are totally backwards in their priorities.

Speaker 3 And it's like the whole thing, the Khalil thing is just such a clear-cut case of just like, you believe in free speech for people that you disagree with or you don't.

Speaker 3 And like, they never gave a rationale for him being held for 100 days, besides the fact that he said anti-Semitic things or was involved in protests that they didn't like, that he passed out the Hezbollah game cards, whatever it was, bingo game.

Speaker 3 There was never any actual crime offered, it was just the Secretary of State can do this. So now he's out, and AOC walked him out.

Speaker 3 And as far as I'm concerned, it's totally fine that AOC did that, and it's okay.

Speaker 3 And me and Mahmoud Khalil probably disagree about a variety of things, but like that's just, that's what it's like living in a messy country with a constitution and a declaration of independence that gives people free speech.

Speaker 3 So I don't know if you have anything to add on the Khalil.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I agree with that. Yeah.

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Speaker 3 On the kind of un-American actions of this administration, I do just want to do a quick word on the transgender military ban which has gone into effect.

Speaker 3 There's another, I'll put this link in the in the notes too.

Speaker 3 There's a good Washington Post story about 10 people that were, 10 transgender people that were now kicked out of the military and what they were doing and what their hopes were.

Speaker 3 And like the whole thing is really just so grotesque.

Speaker 3 And it's like this idea that we have fucking a guy that ducked service that's now engaging in military activity overseas and sending troops into LA in America with no regard for what the norms are and what the laws are of this country, like wants to degrade and punish people who are serving in good standing solely because they're transgender.

Speaker 3 It's just, it's really sick.

Speaker 1 Yeah, disgusting.

Speaker 1 I mean, the assault on transgender people in general, we're so far beyond any reasonable concerns about some of the sports issues and maybe those could be worked out case by case or by local leagues and stuff.

Speaker 1 Youth healthcare. We're beyond the concerns on children, basically, and surgery and puberty blockers and stuff.

Speaker 1 Though I will say, even on that, I've become sort of radicalized in the sense that reading a little bit of the Supreme Court decision late last week, the argument for the Tennessee law is that they get to override everyone.

Speaker 1 The family, the doctor, the kid, other people who maybe the state could insist on some counselors coming in who, you know, sort of to take a look, who are not just hired by the family or by the hospital.

Speaker 1 If they're concerned that there's a kind of collusion going on, I wouldn't necessarily object to that.

Speaker 1 But everyone wants to go ahead with a certain treatment, and the state of Tennessee has decided to prohibit it. You have to have a pretty high bar, in my opinion, and it's important treatment.

Speaker 1 And there's a lot of evidence that if you don't have that treatment, you have real harm to these kids, you know, suicide and suicide attempts and terrible things.

Speaker 1 And the state of Tennessee just gets to block that. I don't know.
It seems to me like the bar. And the Supreme Court was like, hey, it's not really a gender discrimination.

Speaker 1 So we're just going to apply, I think, what they call rational basis scrutiny, which is very low level, not the heightened scrutiny that you should have in sex or race and stuff.

Speaker 1 And so it seems like maybe they had a reasonable reason to be worried about all this, so we're just going to defer to them. Really embarrassingly bad reasoning.
And

Speaker 1 really, they want to stay out of this. They think that's a way they can

Speaker 1 do what they believe, which I suppose is to stop the stuff without really engaging on the merits or in the details.

Speaker 1 But I would just point out that all the conservatives who've all, you know, it's the family, the parents, what's wrong with these books in the elementary school libraries?

Speaker 1 How can a book be there that parents didn't approve of? How can you let teachers say something in class about

Speaker 1 if they're male, about their husband, or if they're female, about their wife, you know, and have a picture of that person on the teacher's

Speaker 1 terrorists? Parents' rights. Parents' rights, totally out the window, totally 100% out the window in this case.
So the animus against transgender people is disgusting.

Speaker 1 And I do worry that it's a little more pervasive than some of the other things Trump is trying to exploit. But of course, as he exploits it, it becomes harsher.

Speaker 1 Were people really worried about these people in the military? Incidentally, I know a fair number of people in the military.

Speaker 1 They weren't really telling me a lot about this in the conversations I've had in the last few years, you know?

Speaker 3 Yeah, and also the military does so much stuff now, right?

Speaker 3 Like in their head, they immediately try to go to like, oh, in the barracks, it might create issues with unit cohesion, which is eye-rolly to begin with.

Speaker 3 But if you like, you actually read this post story, it's like a lot of the folks are like...

Speaker 3 back in an office working on intel gathering you know doing like what possible impact could being transgender have on your ability to be on a computer and do intel gathering for the military or other JAG services, et cetera.

Speaker 3 The whole thing is just fucking preposterous. All right, last thing is: we have this New York mayor's election coming tomorrow.

Speaker 3 We were just discussing about it in Slack. It's a primary.
There's some people on the internet that are acting like this primary as the end of the world,

Speaker 3 that the state of American democracy and the left rests on whether sex pest Andrew Cuomo or

Speaker 3 leftist Zoran Mamdani wins when actually both Mandani and Cuomo are on other ballot lines in this weird New York ballot system. And the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, is on another weird ballot line.

Speaker 3 So it's very possible that tomorrow's election ends, which is also kind of the ranked choice voting thing is a little strange.

Speaker 3 And we end up on Wednesday waking up and it's still Cuomo versus Mamdani versus Adams versus Silwa or whatever the

Speaker 3 vigilante Republican candidate is. So a very weird race.
There are a couple of of normal candidates. If it's too late, if you're looking for somebody to put number one, I really do like Zelda Myrie.

Speaker 3 Brad Lander seems totally fine. Scott Singer seems totally fine.
Adrian Adams seems totally fine. But here we are.
Bill, do you have any takes on your erstwhile hometown?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's depressing.

Speaker 1 And for those of us who've been saying both to ourselves, you know, and of course publicly as well, you know, hey, Abigail Spanberger, Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia.

Speaker 1 Mike Sherrill, Democratic nominee for the governor of New Jersey. That's a Democratic Party that's fine with me.
And I thought the radicals are taking over everything.

Speaker 1 New York City could undercut that argument quite a bit. But again, maybe they could have put up a decent candidate.

Speaker 1 Are there not enough people, the quote, Democratic establishment, don't they kind of live in New York, a lot of them?

Speaker 3 Couldn't they have circled the wagons around someone besides fucking Cuomo?

Speaker 1 Isn't the minority leader of the Senate and the minority leader of the House, aren't they both from New York City? Kind of unusual, actually, in American history, that that's the case? Maybe unique.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Maybe they could have spent a little effort getting like the equivalent of Spanberger or Cheryl.
Maybe that's too high a bar.

Speaker 1 But okay, can they get some sane human, you know, someone who's not a sex pest and who has demonstrated some competence, a mini Bloomberg type, you know, to run and put 50 million bucks up saying this is the guy and you've got to list him somewhere on your ballot and don't list.

Speaker 1 It's fine for me to say, don't list Zorod and stuff. And then you get a moderate who would be reasonable.

Speaker 1 So they've got the, I mean, this is a case where, I've got to say, the moderate Democrats are okay. I think they're fine, actually, mostly around the country.

Speaker 1 Some of these office holders, like Spanberger and Cheryl, who both launched their own political careers in 2018, they need to wait for some establishment to select them are fine, more than fine.

Speaker 1 They're admirable. Jason Crowe, many other people we know, Seth Moulton.
The moderate Democratic establishment is really pathetic. What are these guys doing all the time? They got tons of money.

Speaker 1 They've got tons of allegedly powerful organizations. I don't know.
They're having a lot of Zoom calls. I even get to go on a few of them and listen to them.

Speaker 1 And I don't know what, like, God forbid, in an actual mayor race in the largest city in the country. I don't understand.

Speaker 1 They're not going to worry about a Dayton primary and spend a lot of time making sure Dayton nominates the right kind of Democrat. But maybe New York City, they could have spent a little time on that.

Speaker 1 It's unbelievable. You talk to these guys.
Some of the New York types, it's just, they lament this as if this were a hurricane that they couldn't do anything about. A force of nature.

Speaker 1 Can you believe that we're stuck with this? I was in New York giving a talk a month ago. Can you believe we're stuck with this choice? Now, look, I...

Speaker 1 No individual can change the whole dynamics of a city's politics. And I don't mean to berate some hardworking person who

Speaker 1 doesn't have the time to spend 12 hours a day trying to figure out how to fix this. But I don't know.

Speaker 1 I feel like there should have been a little, some people should have stepped up a little more in this case. What do you think is going to happen?

Speaker 3 They could have looked at the field and circled the wagons around one of the other candidates that's in the field or found another candidate to run. It's not that

Speaker 1 a couple of the other moderate candidates seem perfectly fine, incidentally, right?

Speaker 3 Adrian Adams is fine. She's on the city council or whatever.
Zellner is maybe too young. He's a senator, but like if these are, I don't know.

Speaker 3 You could have found somebody. I agree with that.
And they are pathetic. And the DNC is so bad.

Speaker 3 There's so much news I haven't been able to kind of get to. I have like a little side file of all the dumb stuff that the DNC has been doing lately.

Speaker 3 I've been trying to find a little, an excuse to do a segment on it, but we'll get to it. But, you know, Ken Martin like wants to quit already because he's so weak and frustrated.

Speaker 3 And yeah, I know it is. I was watching TV this weekend and they had a pretty, and it was all lies, obviously.
What was I watching?

Speaker 3 It was either during the, must have been during the LSU College World Series, which they won, go Tigers.

Speaker 3 And I was only half watching it because I don't care that that much about baseball, but like the ad came on, which drew my attention.

Speaker 3 And I looked over, and it was an ad by some Trump super PAC talking about this bill that's going through Congress that was all lies, but it's pretty compelling.

Speaker 3 It's like, oh, it's a working-class tax cut, and we're going to do this for you. Right.
And it's like, okay, well, where, do the Democrats not have any...

Speaker 3 Any counter-messaging they want to put out on this?

Speaker 3 It's a very unpopular bill. So to your point, I think that a lot of the individual moderate Democratic candidates are good, but the institutional Democrats are really struggling.

Speaker 1 And five million people show up at no kings rallies. Was that just one week ago? It's hard to tell.
Yeah, it was literally right.

Speaker 1 And, you know, they're a mixture of obviously lefties and moderates and all kinds of old and young and so forth. But still, they're there to oppose Trump.
They do deserve better.

Speaker 1 political representation, if I can put it that way. There are individuals who AOC represents some of them and Spanberger represents some of them and so forth.

Speaker 1 But yeah, maybe we just need to start, I don't know,

Speaker 1 the real DNC, you know, the ex-Republican DNC. You and I can co-chair it and we'll do a better job.
Pass.

Speaker 3 I will take a pass.

Speaker 3 Excellent. I don't know.

Speaker 3 I think that the first 20 minutes of this podcast eliminated you from being able to lead that, and I choose not to lead it.

Speaker 1 So maybe so. I'm going to lead them back to their Hubert Harry Truman, Hubert Humphreys, Scoop Jackson Boots.

Speaker 1 It's going to be a wonderful, it's going to be a dramatic moment, Tim, in America politics.

Speaker 3 Couldn't be worse than the status quo. Bill Crystal, thank you so much.
We'll see you back here Monday.

Speaker 3 And we we gotta be together next monday actually we'll see i gotta go ahead to dc so uh oh great everybody else we'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the bulwark podcast peace

Speaker 3 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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